Study: Game of Thrones episodes a popular target for hackers, viruses
By Corey Smith
Watch out, Game of Thrones, fans: hackers are coming for you. That is, they’re coming for you if you’re illegally downloading episodes, perVariety. According to a new study from antivirus vendor Kapersky Lab and the U.K.-based BestVPN.com, episodes of Game of Thrones are more likely to carry hidden malware than episodes of any other show.
Video files can carry hidden executable files that infect the target computers when the user opens the video. Over the past year, Kaspersky and BestVPN.com looked at 50,000 users, and found 170,000 instances of malware trying to infect their machines through illegally downloaded Game of Thrones episodes.
Hackers make use of other shows, too, but Game of Thrones is easily the most popular. Hackers made about 100,000 infection attempts through episodes of AMC’s The Walking Dead, on roughly 20,000 computers around the world. After that, there’s a sharp dropoff. Episodes of Netflix’s Stranger Things accounted for 13,257 attempts affecting 4,600 users, while HBO’s Westworld had 5,300 attempts on 2,063 computers.
Earlier this year, a related study by Wojciech Hardy of the Institute for Structural Research and the University of Warsaw, found that the leak of the first four episodes of Game of Thrones season 5 back in 2015 led to a permanent uptake in piracy, for Thrones and other shows. I guess that’s what happens when a show is as popular as this.
Likewise, passwords for services like HBO Go and HBO Now remain some the most popular passwords for sale on the dark web. Whether or not it wants to be, HBO is always number one.
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