A few weeks ago, a court in Madrid issued a statement to block access to the home page of ‘The Pirate Bay’ and all associated domains. The court based on the premise of the Spanish “Ley Sinde” to provide torrent downloads stopping in Spain, as it has in 13 other countries.
So much for the theory; but the practice is a bit different. Although the judges established a 48 hour limit for all operators to veto these webs to its users, some have still to execute the warrant.
But the issue won’t be solved when they proceed. For years, members of ‘The Pirate Bay‘ have ensured its continuity through mirror pages, exact copies of the original site.
Any one of them gives you access to a server where you can find a copy of the torrents available for downloading movies, music and other files. So, you can keep downloading through The Pirate Bay just using alternative paths.
At the beginning there were a few dozen of these clones, but now this number is exorbitant. IsoHunt, another platform for sharing documents, is the one to blame. After the end of last year, when the Swedish police arrested some members of The Pirate Bay and led to the system crashing, the responsibles of this other web sympathized with them.
The result of their effort to keep up the torrent (pirate) flagship is the project called: The Open Bay, a fully editable open source version of the original site. Using this template, anyone with a basic knowledge of web design and programming can develop a site that indexes the contents of The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt and KickAss Torrents.
Now that ‘The Pirate Bay’ is operational again and banned in most countries, some people use the tool The Open Bay with even less lawful purposes than just sharing files without respecting a license. Cybercriminals insert parts of the content of an alleged mirror page (via iframe) on other websites that use the WordPress content management system.
So far it seems that there is no bigger problem, if it wasn’t because the address (which we are not going to tell you for your own safety) doesn’t lead to download site. When someone clicks on the link, a malware infects their computer and records the owner’s information, as bank details or passwords, sending them later to the criminals.
Why WordPress? This tool is not insecure on its own; cybercriminals based their attack on the outdated versions of some plugins, which have vulnerabilities, allowing the criminals insert the iframe with the malicious link.
The number of infected sites is still unknown, but the only way to avoid this code straining in our software is to keep WordPress and all its plugins up-to-date. Internet users that want to keep enjoying The Pirate Bay’s services, do it at their own risk. We just advise them to be cautious and vigilant.
The post The Pirate Bay has grown clones loaded with malware. Beware! appeared first on MediaCenter Panda Security.
