Fake Torrents Flooding Mininova

[Blah]

saw this and there

"There are basically two groups of fake torrents - these shared to attract people and the others to bust people."

read on..................

"The battle against p2p users is on the beginning and it may conclude into serious problems. Probably the most used BitTorrent indexing directory, Mininova.org, is flooded by fake torrents in the last time. Im also one of these daily visitors and I can see at least 2 or 3 confirmed fake torrents a day. Its almost impossible to find out which one is real and which isnt for normal visitor, because the creators of these fake torrents use very advanced methods to hide this cheat.

There are basically two groups of fake torrents - these shared to attract people and the others to bust people. First category is not that bad, but still pretty annoying. Ideal example is today no.1 in TV section - Episode 17 of Prison Break. This famous tv show is aired on thursdays, but sometimes happen that theres a dvd screener released sooner than its on TV. This was also the case of episode 18, which appeared somehow 2 weeks before official launch. The problem is, that theres episode 16 and then episode 18, nothing between it. So people didnt want to watch it until the missing part 17 will be here.

And thats the place for these creators of fake torrents - they make some avi file with same size as normal tv shows, put it on public tracker (Pirate Bay in this case) and upload to mininova. Although its very clear its fake and its also written in the comments, more than 6000 people already tried to download it. They cant succeed, tracker returns only tons of peers with 0% downloaded.

But as I said, this is not the main problem. Much worse option is the second case - fake torrents published by some RIAA or MPAA related company, in order to catch the peers in the swarm. BitTorrent is completely transparent and you dont have many chances to hide your IP when you want to download something So if you try to download such a torrent, you can expect a nice letter in your mailbox pretty soon. The way from your IP to your personal details isnt that complicated, and especially in the USA very common.

The chance of recognizing fake torrent is very low. This second category fools you even more with unreal amount of peers in the tracker - so it reports something like 200 seeders. Ill show this on one example: Little.Manhattan.2005.LiMiTED.DVDRip.XviD-LMG

When someone see this, he cant have any doubts about the quality of the movie. Quite a well-known release group, proper name with the codec used to encode the movie and 15 MB RAR files. The tracker is also OK - reports number of seeders and leechers. But when you look carefully, there is something wrong. New torrent, dvdrip, and already got over 200 peers and almost no leechers? The tracker URL is also totally unknown, but you cant recognize this unless you are deeply experienced within the BT community. All of this is just a trick to get your IP. When you connect to tracker, theres noone with 100% complete files (although the mininova says 200+ seeders) and you will not download single byte. This release also wasnt ever released, in spite of correct scene release name. But again, you cant find this out, if you dont have access to some pre bot or archive of all scene releases.

The addresses of these fake trackers change very often, I cant give you some huge list, but theres one very dangerous announce url, used in last few days in many fake torrents, so you had better to stay away from this: _http://www.commonbits.org:6969/.

The conclusion ? As the BitTorrent world is very popular, it also brings a lot of potential danger for common users. Hollywood studios hate to see their movies being shared before the first night over the internet, so they pay for these IP hunters, who really know how to make their work good to fool you. So to beware this danger and download only proper scene releases with no risk of being catched, I highly recommend you to think twice before you click on download link. The best option for you is to download only from trusted private trackers - or trusted public sites as NewTorrents.info. We do our best to serve you only the top quality "

i dont use mininova anyhow but its a matter of time before this trnd spreads to other sites..

hopefully somebody figures something new out for protection...

peace all

B

[Sigma]

But doesn't PeerGuardian 2 block against this?

[Blah]

i hope so...lol

but i dont think it will help if your d/ling one of these trapped torrents...

[Guest FTW]

Who use crappy public trackers anyway? U only get poor speed and webjunk cause as soon as people finished dl they delete torrent and many uploaders on open trackers are complete amatures or copyright holders uploading bogus files..For better speed,quality and a bit more security sign up on some big closed trckers

Edited April 18, 2006 by FTW

[Blah]

all 0-day stuff is always private trackers/ftps,etc(for me anyhow) but when you want to find a old release from 2004 or whatever these public ones might be your only option if your not "l33t" like me....haha

its impossible to find a older release on a private tracker cause they have a time limit for files..

peace

B

[Guest Nemesis02]

Wow.. that scary... i use PeerGuardian, but maybe someone needs to make a site with these fake trackers on it.