Piracy and Security (part 1.5)

Well, it is not really a follow up of my last post but goes into the same direction:

A few years ago (I was still working in Switzerland) we ran an event where consumer could bring us their PC and we checked it for viruses and cleaned it where necessary. When we found a heavily infected machine, we often heard statements like “my kid is using peer-to-peer networks, is it possible that it comes from there"?” It was really interesting as it was always “my kid” never “I” . But additionally we learned that peer-to-peer network were already a very important infection vector for consumer PCs. A challenge is that there is often illegal software and movies on there and this content is downloaded from completely untrusted sources.

If you look at the End to End Trust framework we published, this will be addressed by the trusted stack.

However, this is not the real reason for the post. I got a summary of a Chinese bulletin about infected sites with the statement in there:

A [Company] security expert said that presently, ticket sales and movie download sites are the primary targets of hackers to install malicious software and that they contained over 80% of all trojans.

So, be careful what you do if you use peer to peer networks…

Roger