Visitors to Pirate Websites More Chanced to Contract Malware

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who recently conducted a study uncovered that browsing pirate websites for too long is likely to endanger viewers with malware at an increasing rate. The study under the leadership of Prof. Rahul Telang of CMU went on for 12 months when he watched for the browsing activity by more than 250 participants sitting inside Security Behavior Laboratory. Unfortunately, pirate website operators normally don't know when malicious uploaders or unsafe advertisers spread malware else adware through such websites.

The latest discoveries provide certain in-depth knowledge of how pirate websites relate to malware proliferation. And though study asserts that people visiting websites, which provide piracy-based services, have greater danger of getting infected with malware, there may be temptation to overlook it. In particular, spending time twice as much on the above mentioned websites raises the chances of malware infection by 20%. Gizmodo.co.uk posted this, March 19, 2018.

Surprisingly, regular people visiting pirate sites often don't have anti-virus programs on their computers. And though there's no definite indication about malware proliferating chiefly via pirate sites, it has been found that the mean malicious programs existing on any pirate's system turns out 1.5 in comparison with 1.4 on systems that never access any pirate site. With people still taking down content at no charge and illegally, the said dangers involved mayn't really stop pirate websites' desperate fans from accessing such content.

The study's function based on scrutiny of the total files taken down online onto the participants' PCs drew an analysis of the results with VirusTotal reports.

Intriguingly, there were indeed adware in those reports albeit the ultimate results in fact do distinguish it from malware of more serious kind. Notably according to the study, it's truly difficult to classify adware, particularly because adware is created for delivering ads instead of any content that's more dangerous. The study also distinguished results for assuaging fears about malware exposure at high rates following dodgy advertising.

Eventually, the implication is that piracy websites do have greater danger than other kinds of online sites essentially because the goal of such websites is to provide content not obtainable from elsewhere.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/23/2018