![is the pirate download safe is the pirate download safe](https://uploads.dailydot.com/ea3/27/31d5465e4a2cff20cc5a5e6c06167558.jpg)
On the other hand, you can argue that it would be rare to find pirated movies that were infected with malware, for two main reasons: (More precisely, TPB shares links to files, not the files themelves, a legalistic nuance not accepted by every court.) One place where you might assume there would be lots of malware is infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, or TPB for short.
![is the pirate download safe is the pirate download safe](http://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_optimized,f_auto/p/a0fbb6c0-9b27-11e6-b49f-00163ed833e7/3653247933/pirates-of-the-caribbean-4-windows-7-theme-screenshot.jpg)
![is the pirate download safe is the pirate download safe](https://downloads.guru/i/win10/Sid-Meier-s-Pirates_overview_30105_650x200.jpg)
In recent years, however, pirated software has deliberately and regularly, if not frequently, been used to spread malware.Ĭrooks rip off popular software distributions, add their own “secret sauce”, and then announce them in pirate forums or on imposter sites, hoping that sufficiently many victims will download them and end up infected before word gets out. Pirated software turned out to be a much less dangerous vector for virus infection than people first assumed.
Is the pirate download safe full#
Most virus infections, in fact, came from data disks, or even from otherwise blank disks, that contained what were known as boot sector viruses.Įvery disk, pirated or not, code or data, full or empty, had a boot sector, and if you left an infected floppy in your computer by mistake when you turned it on, the infection would spread when the boot sector loaded. Ironically, perhaps, a lot of software piracy back then involved simply copying a friend’s copy using low-level disk cloning software, itself usually pirated, that made precise and perfect copies. The theory was simple: disks handed around for repeated unlawful duplication couldn’t be trusted, especially after they’d been passed between many different users, any one of whom could have infected them along the way, whether through carelessness or malevolence.
Is the pirate download safe how to#
Thanks to Andrew O’Donnell of SophosLabs for his behind-the-scenes work on this article.īack in the early days of computer viruses, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, advice on how to avoid infection often started like this: