Bit harsh, some folk cannot afford the prices of music, dvd's etc Iv'e been on some of the sites listed, AFAIK I have had no problems. Then again I use Sandboxie. Also some of the artists make me sick, for instance Adele or Taylor Swift ( already multi millionaires ) not allowing their rubbish music on sites like Spotify, pure greed Also how can a company like Amazon charge more for a 1mb digtal book than they do for the paperback ? . Personally I use usenet, I have no qualms about piracy.
It's not harsh. TV, music, games, programs; none of these are a necessity, none sustain life. If one can't afford these, one shouldn't use them without authorization. Not to mention, most people I see saying "I can't afford" are lying, because either they have big screen TV's, or buy expensive clothing, or go out to parties every weekend, or whatever else they're doing that doesn't allow them to save more money. I can understand if a father has to steal bread to give to his starving daughter. I can't stand people stealing luxuries that they don't need.
This has going on for a while. The only thing new are the techniques and exploits being used nowadays. Looking for Warez has always carried an element of risk, just like going into a bad neighborhood to look for something illegal in real life. I've visited many risky places on the internet and never been compromised because I take care to lock down my systems and browsers. I don't either support or condemn piracy. Thanks to the abundance of GPL software and free licenses for commercial software, anything I could possibly want to do with a computer has many software offerings to do it with. But to each his own. I advise against using warez or visiting sites that offer pirated content because it is risky behavior like doing hard drugs but I also believe in free speech, free choice and personal responsibility so I can't condemn others for making different choices and I'm against limiting those choices.
File extensions anyone? Even if it's morally and legally sound, spreading FUD is not the way to educate people.
As I understand most times it was drive-by not users running executables thinking it was torrent file. So in this case people should be educated about updating their browsers and system.
haha, I thought the same. If there were a lot of drive-by attacks Noscript alone would take care of that problem.
From what I understand, a lot of the exploits try to get an executable somewhere it can execute without the user even knowing about it. Typically this is in a user's folder or a temp folder or several other Windows system folders where the default ACL allows users to execute files. Noscript or any other script blocker would prevent the whole process from starting in the first place. Blocking redirects and third party iframes is a good idea to. Then the code that tries to drop the payload will never be reached. The execution of the payload can be stopped by locking down the execution of unauthorized .exes with ACLs, SRP and Applocker. One of the few good things I can say about Windows 10 Pro is that it comes with Applocker. It is not just .exe files you have to worry about either. Scripting has to be blocked as well. A lot of damage can be done with .cmd and powershell scripts, typically they can be used to elevate privilege so something can be executed that normally wouldn't. Applocker has Windows script blocking in addition to executable blocking.
This make sense. Back in the days I did download quite a lot of music, my excuse was that I didn't feel like buying a whole album, when I only wanted access to a couple of songs, but I believe services like Spotify and iTunes made this possible. I never downloaded movies, too much work and torrents almost never work on my system. An excuse to download movies would be that not all movies are available in shops and on services like Netflix.
While I certainly don't condone piracy, I can't recall ever being infected just by visiting a torrent site. Certainly there may be malicious downloads. But, I would need to manually download (unless the malicious files were included in a torrent download) and launch them in order to get infected. I guess it is because I keep Windows, Flash and Java updated, as I never do anyting to secure my browsers, and don't use any kind of web filtering, other than sometimes using my browsers included ad blocker. There was a case two years ago, where I was infected just by visiting a website. This was not one of my computers and it was not updated.
"Once a user visits a piracy site and is invisibly infected with malware" - nothing but fearmongering regardless of everything else. Mrk
Does anyone remember ANDR? Back then the verbiage from the n00bs to the ANDR forum was ANDR drops trojans!!! Over & over n00bs would keep coming & be outraged. At the forum we'd just laugh. Forgive me Wilders members that was close to 20 years ago. I'm a better & kinder person since then. Course it was the site not the forum that was infected.
Could happen but it is another case of using mass exposure and out of thousands of visits finding the few systems that have the right combination of vulnerabilities and lax security to succeed. Even clicking on a malicious link is no guarantee that a system will be exploited and compromised.
