332M Kick Ass pirates get asses kicked by scareware ass-kickers The world's most popular pirate torrent site KickAss Torrents is serving scareware advertising, helping dodgy call centre operators con users into handing over remote access to their machines. KickAss Torrents gained the top spot among movie, TV, and software pirates after the temporary scuppering of the Pirate Bay, which …
No, not sure, but if they have worked to find Kick Ass (a colleague helped me after BT junkie shuttered), I would tend to think that, yes they might be more tech savvy dl'ers than those that hit the Pirate Bay for example. However, it's just my off center thinking. Nothing is what it appears.
They have ads? Joking, of course. If I should go there then every kind of blocking you can think of would be in place. That's aside from using a VM as I've been doing forever (1999). I did peek at their front page and there's no notice about this occurring. So either it's handled or someone ain't keeping an eye out, which I doubt.
KAT has become an increasingly less pleasant place to rummage for missed TV shows and other gubbins over the last few months with increasingly aggressive JS popups and general bullshit and (assumedly) cookie malarkey.
All of it very very dodgy-looking. Might go rummage around PB again for those missed EP1's and stuff cos frankly KAT feels like a menace to use.
If I were to partake in such underhand computer use such as accessing torrent sites, I'd use a minimal software Linux VM. Makes it pretty tough for windows executables to run when there are no windows libraries and makes a mockery of popup windows "errors".
A purely theoretical situation of course and there are plenty of legitimate uses for torrents.
..and if you are going to clean your toilet how many hazmat suits do you wear?
For me its balance of convenience over security, leaning towards the convenience side.
If flash and other crap is up to date , and browser , then i'm probly ok.
I suspect the majority of crap gets on computers because people AGREE to install it.
They try to download , say , a driver . For reason only a user could explain they have ended up at "drivers-R-Us" rather than HP.com and when the they click the GIANT green button that says "FREE DOWNLOAD of your stuff , plus good karma forever" , they arnt in the least phased then the download dialogue box asks if theyd like to run "Downloadmanager.exe" rather than "printerdriver.zip"
If people just check wether the type of file they are getting matches what they want , and pay attention to where its coming from everything would be ok.
(ok 0 day drive bys not covered in my sucurity policy , but i dont constantltly cruise the sort of sites theyd be set up at and rely on not being the first victim)
That's a lot of phone calls to make, are you sure that 332 Million people really got their ass kicked, or is this just scaremongering headlines for the El Reg reasdership.
This is an old scam and those indian call center people can be convincing to the non-tech savvy... they are also extremely agressive, warn your parents, family and friends not to accept tech calls from "anyone"....
It doesn't seem to happen now, but some time ago there were fake magnet icon links on Kick Ass listings that actually linked to .exe download sites which claimed to install a great torrent downloader. I didn't use them of course but I wonder how many people tried them. I can understand that rogue adverts get through but that seemed to be very underhand work by the site's owners.
Yea, I've seen those redirects that 'suggest' you install their little client to "Enjoy a faster download experience"
Anyone who's tech savvy will ignore that crap.
However, with downloading being so fast and simple, rest assured there are millions of downloaders (say "Leechers") who are not that savvy and when the 50-something does a Google search for "my favourite TV series episode that I missed" there candles draw the moths to the flames...
(BTW I am a 50-something... but more than a little tech savvy than many I know)
They enter Kickass and bang! The scareware popups do their job, scaring these types into believing there is legitimately something wrong with their PCs...
Nothing comes free and like any site KAT have to pay their hosting fees and I am sure they don't exactly vet those who throw money to banner advertise on their site...
"Yea, I've seen those redirects that 'suggest' you install their little client to "Enjoy a faster download experience"
Anyone who's tech savvy will ignore that crap."
I tend to agree, but I would like to note that some of us have been pre-conditioned to accept download managers to some degree. E.g. a few years ago Microsoft pushed a download manager on anyone trying to download stuff from their MSDN site.
I can't recall any recent incidents of that type however, so hopefully that nonsense is in the past. I just find it interesting that once again, yesterday's bad habit is today's security pitfall.
Victim blaming? I know some people are almost literally thicker than mud, but that doesn't make con artists any less culpable. Stating someone "deserved" to be a victim of crime is something I would prefer people stopped doing, it takes away from the point that the crime should never have happened in the first place.
That got pwned by a phone support scam. The page popped up from a free music download site. Silly girlie that owned the lappie had called the number and followed the instructions!
So, yes, people are that daft, and many people crusing the interwebs for free content aren't tech-savvy.
During the time of Back Orifice, I would scan our ISP's dialup IPs (I was a system admin) for infected PCs and give them a popup stating to call tech support and even which tech to ask for. Sometimes it took a few messages but they would eventually call, slightly surprised to learn that the popup was true and they really had an issue to address.
Good Karma! Yeah, right. That's what the guys from iYogi kept saying all the time when they tried to scam one of my clients who got in a pickle after a harddrive failed and he couldn't immediately find the registration info for his Quickbooks and called Intuit's tech support number...
Luckily, I got the info from the bad hard drive and he got his money back after complaining to the credit card company, who were well aware of those scammers...
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