this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
106 points (99.1% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
54565 readers
398 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
yes, it's mostly things like games or software
though, I have seen more & more reports of people finding malicious disguised LNK files in their downloads and torrents, which will run some arbitrary command if you open that: Windows does not ever show the LNK extension, so a file could be named ".mkv.lnk", and you would only know if you checked the "file type" column in Explorer (which would read "Shortcut" instead of something like "Matryoshka file"), or when you see the cmd.exe window flicker open and close.
bonus edit: LNK is the native file extension that Windows uses to link app shortcuts, such as the shortcuts on your desktop.
Link files will show the .lnk extension on Linux and it should be obvious from the icon that it's not a video file. If you have wine installed, then double clicking one will run it and malware can still cause problems when run in wine.
If your torrent client has the option to run a script or command when a download completes, you could have it delete all .lnk files in the download directory. Something like
find /path/to/my/download/directory -type f -iname "*.lnk" -deletewould work.It should also be obvious in your torrent client as it will be listed there with the full file name.
Not showing suffix on a file browser is just stupid…
Yes, thank god windows has turned it off by default these days... /s
I have literally never downloaded pirated software since OS 9 went away and OS X became a thing. Open up your task manager and look at how many processes there are (Window, Mac or Linux) and ask yourself if you're going to notice the one extra process that is out of place.
As for files with extra extensions, this is why you should always set Explorer/Finder/whatever to show all file extensions the very first thing, regardless of what OS you're running too.
That's why you should scan every torrent download before opening the files.