Torrent download of “The Interview” leads to banking Trojan

According to McAfee researcher Irfan Asrar, torrents for the movie “The Interview” are making the rounds in South Korea. Asrar identified a bogus app that claims it will download the movie to your Android device but instead downloads a banking Trojan.

According to Asrar, the Trojan targets customers of popular South Korean banks, as well as international player Citibank. However, in an unusual twist, devices manufactured in North Korea receive a hands off message. At least 20,000 Android devices have been affected.

Asrar’s team traced the Trojan back to a Chinese mail server.

The Trojan was hosted on Amazon Web Services, and after the research team notified Amazon, it was removed.

The lesson here is to download from legit sources. Downloading from totally unregulated peer-to-peer torrents is a seriously bad idea.