Research at the University of Ballarat has found people illegally downloading files like movies and music risk receiving malicious code.The joint project with the university, the Federal Police, the State Government, IBM and Westpac began about two years ago.To read this ABC News report in full, see:
www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-09/research-finds-risk-in-illegal-downloads/2878140Also see:Determining Infringing Content on BitTorrent Networks: Enhancing Sampling and Detecting Fake Files
Executive Summary: At the ICSL, we have developed a methodology for systematically estimating the true extent of illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Previous studies have found that the overwhelming majority of BitTorrent usage was for sharing copyright infringing content. We have identified a clear power law relationship between torrents and downloads, meaning that a small number of very popular torrents account for a larger proportion of overall downloads. We also validated the results by cross‐checking the relative proportions of categorised downloads (movies, music, software etc.) against keyword terms entered onto a popular torrent search engine site.Multiple versions of many files, most notably movies, are available for download via BitTorrent. Further to that, there are millions of torrents on BitTorrent networks, released under a variety of circumstances and legalities. The focus of this report is on popular usage of BitTorrent. We look primarily at the top 1000 most downloaded and top 1000 most actively seeded torrents. To remove the effect of outliers and potentially biased numbers, we remove any torrents not occurring on at least three trackers we scraped and use the median value in our calculations. We further validate our findings by randomly sampling from all torrents collected.In this report, we further refine and extend the methodology by introducing a second sampling technique for identifying popular and available trackers, and for identifying “fake” files which are being shared. In some cases, users may search for and attempt to download infringing content and the downloaded file is a fake, potentially containing malware. We factored this into the findings and found a large number of popular torrents appear to be faked. Further to this, we show a strong body of evidence that suggests that nearly all BitTorrent use is nefarious in nature, either faked files or copyright infringing.The key findings of this report are:
- 50% of popular torrents appear to be faked files, either malware or incorrect files.
- 60% of popular torrents are movie based content.
- 97.9% of BitTorrent use in our samples is nefarious in nature, either faked files, copyright infringing or criminally infringing.
- 97.2% of of the most popular “real” torrents (i.e. not faked files) are copyright infringing.