PSA/HOWTO: Avoid fake mkv torrents. Avoid getting hacked

American_Jesus@lemm.ee to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 226 points –

There are some torrrents showing up with .lnkextension (ex: movie.mp3.lnk, tvshow.mkv.lnk...) and automated software (Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, qBittorrent RSS Downloader) could pick those torrents (but not import).

These (fake) torrents include a .lnk file that executes a script on your Windows

HOW TO exclude from download on qBittorrent.

  • Go to Options -> Downloads

  • Enable "Exclude file names"

  • Add patterns:

(one by line)

*.mp4.lnk  
*.mp3.lnk  
*.mkv.lnk
*.torrent.lnk

Or exclude all together: *.lnk

Example on VirusTotal https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e74f64df6ebaf3a1b6e3f42591eb6e87d2ac2828eb5a99fd8d3d82c140137fc9/detection

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Me too, but don't want to download GBs of malware and bandwidth

Weak.
Harbor disaster. Seed the malware. Spread the fruits of chaos amongst the unworthy. Be complicit in their downfall. Feed on their agony ^^/s

.lnk files are less than 4kb

That would seem suspicious. I'm sure they have some way to pad out the size.

Anyone paying attention to size would probably also notice they're just .lnk files.

Not necessarily. Even with "hide extensions" unchecked, Windows hides the .lnk extension by default; it just shows an arrow in the bottom-right corner of the icon, which is plausibly missed when in the list view. I'm surprised antivirus doesn't know about it already tbh.