Torrents have had a bad wrap over the years. Usually nothing to do with viruses but people use them to transmit files all over the internet and a lot of the time it is movies which are illegal to download with paying for them like the Game of Thrones series or a new popular.
Australians are notorious for this, but Torrents are not only used for downloading copyrighted material.
What are Torrents
Before torrents come along the best and only way to download a file was to download it directly from a website or single source.
If that source was slow or down or had too many people downloading the file it could take a long time or the download would fail altogether.
Torrents are a set of instructions which help your computer download a file from multiple sources simultaneous, from people like yourself who are also uploading or downloading the torrent directly from your computer.
If there are a lot of people using the torrent it is a very efficient, fast and affordable way to transmit and receive files over the internet.
How Do Criminals Use Torrents to Infect Computers
Because a lot of people use Torrents to download illegal material, they are already operating in the realm of “looking for trouble” to begin with.
The criminals know this and use it to their advantage to infect your computer by adding their viruses and malicious software to the torrent in hope that you open it when you receive your file.
It is a very effective way you transfer a file and we can often tell when someone has viruses on their computer, if they got it from a torrent file or not.
How Can I Download Torrents Safely
For starters if you are doing it illegally I don’t have an answer for you. It in a lot of cases always infected.
If you are downloading a legitimate torrent file, you are probably not the first.
A lot of torrent sites will have a comments section for each torrent and if the files is infected there will be a lot of unhappy people commenting about it so it is always good to read the comments before you download.
Also, if in doubt don’t download it.
