Pirate Windows 7 RC Used To Build Botnet
If you were too impatient to wait for the official release of Windows 7 RC and grabbed an early unauthorised copy via BitTorrent, there’s a nasty sting in the tale: your PC might well be part of a botnet.
The Genuine Windows Blog points to two recent examples of messed-up fake Windows 7 candidates: one simply a trojan masquerading as the download, the other part of a torrented download of Windows 7 RC which has now apparently been activated to create a 25,000-machine botnet. Now, I’d be the last to argue that Microsoft’s piracy protection schemes are anything but always painful and often messily implemented, but even that’s better than becoming a patsy for some idiot Viagra seller or identity thief.
Comments
Hi,
I guess that it was worth checking my BT Checksum against the one M$ provided prior to the release. From what I remember LH had a link to it.
I don’t know why people are not downloading it directly from the MS site? I was at a BBQ the other day and some guy said he found Win7 RC1 on a torrent site and downloaded it.
Only reason is because it was leaked onto torrent sites a few days early.
A few reasons why you might torrent rather than download from the Microsoft site:
1) Large downloads often time out part way through the download, and if you’re not using a download manager, you can’t resume.
2) For a few days, after the releases of both Build 7000 and RC1, the MS website went down a number of times due to server overloading, and when it wasn’t down, people were reporting VERY slow speeds (read: 5 or so kb/s). Meanwhile some torrents had something like 1000+ seeders and basically no speed limits
3) It’s very easy to schedule a torrent to only download in off-peak, instead of using a download manager that you’ll have to turn off most of the time anyway.
Is there anywhere that shows the MD5 checksum for the official .iso releases (both 32-bit and 64-bit)? As well as an easy way to check said MD5?