Gamers that are using Torrent download sites for cracked games may be victimized by PUA's (potentially unwanted application).

Sebastian Zatorski, a researcher with Symantec, has found that discovered a PUA downloader on popular torrent game sites that is using popular games as bait. The PUA may not be as serious as ransomware, but it can affect a device's security, privacy, resource consumption and is associated with other security risks.

“We believe that the actors behind the PUA distribution campaign were abusing various pay-per-install affiliate campaigns in order to achieve monetary gain by pushing as much different PUA applications as possible. During the analyzed campaign we also noticed that the PUA software delivered by the downloaders (PUA.ICLoader.g3) has been changing frequently - one more [piece of] evidence that various pay-per-install campaigns might have been in use here,” Zatorski wrote in the blog.

The games most affected include:

• World of Warcraft: Legion
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
• Tom Clancy's The Division
• Just Cause 3
• The Walking Dead: Michonne

“In the recent PUA campaign, we have seen this with the example of World of Warcraft: Legion being advertised on the 3rd party torrent sites – the official game is not available yet. In the past there have been other numerous examples of spikes in email spam related to not released yet gaming titles, promising either free activation keys or beta invitations. Such campaigns are usually targeted at malware/PUA distribution or credentials phishing,” Zatorski said.

Source: SCMagazine