Pirated 'Game Of Thrones' Most Often To Have Malware, Research Finds

On Monday, security firm Kaspersky released a report detailing how hackers have made their ways into pirated TV shows.

One of them is through Game of Thrones, considered as one of the most popular and highly anticipated by fans, even before its premiere. The medieval fantasy series have become a critical and commercial success, with The Guardian saying that it was "the biggest drama" and "the most talked about show" on television.

And Kaspersky's report shows that the series' contents were responsible for approximately 17 percent of infected downloads, affecting 20,934 users.

This happened in 2018, the year in which the series didn’t release a single new episode.

Security researchers at the company discovered 33 types of threats and 505 different families of threats contained within torrented Game of Thrones episodes.

The series is followed by the HBO hit The Walking Dead, Arrow, and other popular shows like The Big Bang Theory, Suits, and This Is Us.

"While the way we consume TV content is rapidly changing, the content itself remains in high demand, and users resort to any means available to get at it – including illegal and non-ethical ones like the use of pirated stuff," said Kaspersky on its post.

While companies have started providing paid subscriptions, like Netflix, many countries are still fighting against illegally distributed contents.

According to the Annual Piracy Report by Muso, the global technology company providing anti-piracy, market analytics and audience connection solutions, the numbers of pirated content consumers are growing. The company registered more than 300 billion visits to pirate websites in 2017 alone.

This was an increase of 1.6 percent from 2016.

And within these pirated contents, hackers have embedded malware to infect users' device.

Other Kaspersky's key findings, include:

• The total number of users who encountered by TV-show-related malware in 2018 was 126,340 globally, one-third less than in 2017.
• The number of attacks by such malware has seen a decrease of 22% to 451,636 registered attempts.
• Same as user count, as the malware count also declined. In 2017, Kaspersky saw 82,091 samples, but in 2018 that number dropped 30 percent to 57,133.
• ‘Winter Is Coming‘, which is the very first episode of the 'Game of Thrones', was the one most actively used by cybercriminals.
• On average, 2.23 users were attacked seven times per each malware file guised as a TV shows.
• American Horror Story was the most effective malware cover, with each malicious file hidden behind the title has reached an average of three users.
• Not-a-virus:Downloader and Not-a-virus:AdWare were two of the most popular threats delivered via TV show contents.
• The most dangerous malware type is the Trojan.

Explaining the declining number of attacks, Kaspersky explained that it "might be connected to some of this year’s events potentially affecting the number of torrent file downloads."

"First, in 2018, Google downranked more than 65,000 torrent websites – major distributors of pirated TV shows – leaving great many users unable to find them when looking for TV series downloads. Active action against torrent websites does make a difference, more and more of them finding themselves blocked or troubled."