Korean Drama series torrents infecting computers with viruses

Korean content, especially movies, music videos, and drama series, have garnered a lot of attention even outside South Korea.

Many international and local fans often lookup for alternative methods to consume the content and torrents have been the considerable part of this search.

Is torrent downloads of Korean drama series legal?

Firstly torrenting is not illegal, but torrent downloads of copyrighted content without permission is prohibited.

Most of the drama shows are copyrighted, which means that downloading them from torrent could land you in legal troubles.

Virus spreading through Korean drama torrents?

According to a report of WeLiveSecurity based on data gathered by ESET antivirus, several hundreds of devices are infected.

As the reports points, the malware was acquired from the torrent files of Korean drama downloaded from several torrent websites. Of all the device infected 80 percent belongs to South Korea, 10 percent from China, and 5 percent are from Taiwan.

According to the researchers, the malware is called GoBotKR, which is a modified variant of GoBot2. GoBot 2 is designed to avoid detection in South Korea.

How GoBotKR spread among the users?

Hackers used Korean drama media files to spread the GoBotKR malware on the devices of the users.

When the users download the torrent, they get a video file alongside an executable LNK file behaving like a link to open the video file. However, the link is just fake codecs to download the GoBotKR.

If you open the file directly, then it will not harm your computer, but if users click on then LNK file, then it downloads the malware.

Once the computer gets infected, it is added to the network of bots, which can be controlled by hackers. This network is used to perform a sizeable DDoS attack without the torrent user knowing.

I would advise you to avoid these torrents sites as downloading these torrents might compromise your safety and security.

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