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By George Norman - Software News Editor

Added on 06 Jan 2009(1061 Views)

Sophos , company that specializes in providing security software solutions, has recently detected a Trojan that performs a rather peculiar task: once it infects a machine, it prevents the user from accessing torrent trackers The Pirate Bay and Mininova. One might even go as far as to say that the Trojan in question, identified as Troj/Qhost-AC by Sophos, is actually looking out for you, since most of the data transferred from peer to peer is subjected to copyright laws, or is pirated.

People are fooled into downloading the Trojan because it poses as a keygen – once you download it, the interesting part is that it will not install any form of malware or unwanted software onto your machine. Its task is a simple one: to prevent you from accessing the two aforementioned torrent trackers, which happen to be the three most popular trackers in the world to date. It accomplishes its task by redirecting your request to 127.0.0.1 – in layman’s terms, you may enter the address of The Pirate Bay into your browser’s address bar, but the site will not load in a million years.


Instead, you will get a popup that says claims peer-to-peer data sharing is something you should not do; you even get an annoying “downloading is wrong” audio message.

“I didn’t follow the well established rules of downloading. It was a file with a low number of seeds, many leechers and no comments. I’ve downloaded the file and didn’t visit the torrent page again to view if there were any negative comments,” says a victim of Troj/Qhost-AC in a letter to TorrentFreak.

The only upside to this is that it only affects Windows-based operating systems – Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 is in the clear and so is Linux. Perhaps you would use this occasion to switch to Ubuntu 8.10 or even the recently released Super Ubuntu 2008.11.



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Tags: PirateBay, MiniNova, Sophos, Trojan

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