How to Investigate a Fake BitTorrent Tracker
Seeding fake files on BitTorrent is nothing new, and the practice has been carried out by anti-piracy groups and malware spreaders for a long time. While many of them choose to use various open and public BitTorrent trackers, others are setting up their own trackers. We take a look at an easy way to find out more about them.
Back in 2007 TorrentFreak published a series of articles on various dodgy practices targeted at BitTorrent users. Many people were downloading torrents only to be told that they needed to install software like DomPlayer and 3WPlayer to get them to work. Of course, the torrents were fake.
We also reported on BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll, and GetTorrent, which also caused a whole load of trouble for those who installed them—even uTorrent and WinZip users were in the sights of malware offloaders.
In an email yesterday to TorrentFreak, a reader pointed us to a problem torrent located here (removed). The file is clearly labeled as ‘The Wolfman DVDrip 2010 aXXo’, but it is a fake—a fact which can be quickly learned by reading the comments underneath the torrent. Nevertheless, we thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how it’s possible to look a little deeper.
The file is tracked by a whole range of trackers but one sticks out immediately.
http://tracker.torrentq.com/announce.php currently lists 48,416 seeds and 37,496 seeders for the supposed ‘The Wolfman’ movie, a highly attractive proposition for those inexperienced in dealing with fake torrents.
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