New Delhi: Here comes a serious warning for "Spider-Man: No Way Home" fans trying to download the movie via torrent file transfer on websites. Cybersecurity firm ReasonLabs has said that crypto miners are misleading people via torrent files of the new offering in a super popular Marvel series.
The ReasonLabs research team found Monero miners attached to Russian torrent files for the new movie.
The crypto-miner adds exclusions to Windows Defender, creates persistence and generates a watchdog process to maintain its activity, according to the company.
"The malware is not signed or written in .net and, as of this date, is not present in 'VirusTotal'. The malware tries to prevent the eyes from examining, using 'legitimate' names for the files and processes it creates", the company said in a statement.
"We recommend taking special care when downloading content from any kind of unofficial sources, be it a document in an email from an unknown sender, a decrypted program from a suspicious download portal or a file from a torrent download," he advised.
Although this malware does not compromise personal information (which is what most users fear when they think of a virus on their computer), the damage that a miner causes can be seen in the user's electricity bill.
"This is real money that they have to pay, since the miner works for long periods," the researchers said.
"Also, damage can be felt on a user's device as miners often require high CPU usage, causing the computer to drastically slow down," he added.
ReasonLabs said that it is still investigating the origins of the miner, but noted that they constantly see miners implemented as common programs, files of interest, popular applications, current events, etc.
Tom Holland's "Spider-Man: No Way Home" star has broken records as she has grossed Rs 79.14 crore at the Indian box office in just three days of its release.
Cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky warned last week that scammers are misleading people and stealing their banking details via phishing links based on the new movie "Spider-Man: No Way Home."
They observed heightened activity by scammers prior to the film's release and found numerous examples of phishing websites set up to steal viewers' bank details.
In other cases, victims who wanted to download the movie end up installing malicious and unwanted programs, Adwares, and even Trojans.
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Posted on: Sunday, December 26, 2021, 02:05 PM M. IST
