A pirate’s life for me? Well, certainly for somebody out there. If you’ve been around the world of piracy for more than a day, you’re probably already familiar with the fact that sometimes torrents come bundled with viruses. Well, the latest trend in viruses is secret Bitcoin miners, and it seems that somebody jumped on the Watch Dogs hype-train to make some quick coin. It feels almost fitting considering the theme of the game, though the irony is probably not as entertaining if you’ve fallen victim to the hack.
One of the most seeded copies of Watch Dogs available online is reported to also install a Bitcoin mining virus on the computer of its victims. Blue Screen crashes, additional power consumption, and an overall unstable computer await those unlucky pirates that couldn’t wait for release day, or didn’t want to spend the cash for a legit copy of Watch Dogs.
While it’s advisable to just not download pirated games in the first place, if you happened to have installed a tainted copy of the game you should probably head over to BleepingComputer.com and start downloading some stuff to fix your poor decision. There’s also some directions in the screenshot above, though a full virus scan is definitely recommended.
There’s still time to get your hands on a legit copy of Watch Dogs on Amazon.com
Editor’s note: The question has come up a few times as to the accuracy of the original 4chan user’s report. We investigated the claim by browsing a number of popular torrent sites and found the releases in question. At the time of writing I did confirm a few torrents with seeders claiming to be infected with a virus. The release mentioned in our story turned out to be a faked SKIDROW release, though I did encounter at least 1 torrent with an alternate name that was also reported to be infected by the users downloading it.
The torrent communities are pretty good at weeding out the bad apples quickly, it’s very likely that the more trusted torrent sites have already removed these torrents from the rotation.
yav he he
Ne yav hehe si. Bildiğin sikti pc’mi.Şuan mavi ekran alıyorum windows açılırken, linux’den yazıyorum.Adam akıllı iş yapmış tebrik ediyorum skidrowum ben diye kandırdı.
That’s what they get
That post was faked, or he got a bad torrent. Worked for me.
Not all of the torrents are infected. I did some research and did verify that some of the torrents are reported to include the virus. Some are legit, some are infected.
again some are “reported” to have it.. that’s not proof just random people making random claims on the internet… if you look at any torrent for almost anything there are always people claiming it contains a virus… most of the time it’s either a false positive because a crack is using themida or something, the virus was picked up from one of the random seeders or along the way and isn’t actual part of the torrent or in a lot of cases the virus was picked up from somewhere else completely and the person is just dumb and blaming it on the torrent… not saying torrents never contain viruses but it’s not really near as common as people will claim
I like torrents because they are fast and easy but it’s a lot better to just direct download it from a trusted uploader who uses storage sites who you know tests first
i have the skydrow release in question and i dont seem to have any virusses or memory/cpu power leaks…. also 3 full scans and a full replacement of all the files i could find it had used with a copy that didn’t seem to have any thing in it i think i got lucky :D
go to hell pirates !!
That’s amazing. What a smart guy lol! The fags who download it cracked deserve it.
Yep, pretty clever indeed.
If you buy this game you are the cancer killing the industry.
Did you deliberately made this comment to promote piracy???
If everyone pirates their games the industry will go bankrupt and there will be no more games to play
This game has 5 fucking Collectors editions, none of which brings all the “bonus” content together so to get everything you have to buy the game 5 times. Ubisoft deserves absolutely no money from this travesty.
your idiot brain is the one killing industry
skidrow ftw
If you don’t know how to pirate a game properly and safely in 2014, you deserve to have your bank accounts cleaned out by Ruski and chink hackers.
I hate the people saying “Serves you right”. I went and torrented it, yes, but I also have an active pre-order for the game. Not all of us have the intention to never buy it.
Hahaa, suckers
If you pirate a game in 2014 you deserve to lose everything. Either buy the game or dont. If you can’t afford it wait for a good sale on Steam. But pirating a game anymore really does mean you are nothing but a thief with the amount of amazing steam sales there are.
k first off 2014 sucks for pirating, except for this and gta 5 coming out. Secondly, your one of the bandwagon hopping idiots that just believes what anyone says lol. Crashing and high power consumption loss is what we “deserve”? Buddy, we have things called anti virus, i’m sure if this propaganda bs was true it would be on more PCn than just some self-rightous nothing page, such as this. You obviously know nothing about anything that is going on here…….we might be thiefs but your a poser kissing ass.
the last two games i didnt try before i parted with my money were awful and a waste of my hard earned cash. i always torrent first to see if its yet another waste of time console port with substandard graphics and gameplay.
you cant even trust the demo versions as half of those end up better than the final release so until devs actually make games FOR the PC instead of shitty ports then people like mewill continue to torrent so im not wasting my money.
A perfect eg isa the recent Wolfenstein release which was meant to have amazing graphics and gameplay but a quick 30 min pootle about and i deleted it as the graphics were rubbish and the gameplay was nothing special at all. i would have been livid if i’d thrown cash away due to over-hyped nonsense as i have done in the past, yet Star Citizen already has my money as its being developed properly and FOR PC.
maybe if developers made games for PC instead of crappy overhyped console ports with demos that do not reflect the final release people would buy instead.
Don’t worry , the torrent downloaded from official skidrowremoved.net is safe but the one download from other sources with the same name maybe a bitcoin miner but after doing some research i found that one of the torrent is with same name but has different hash no. from the one from skidrowremoved.net. That have been removed now. so think before you pirate.
aiman~~~~~~
aiman
BEN BURADAYDIM Ya SEN :D
I dunno. Sounds like an elaborate propaganda scheme.
this shit just gives the “I don’t break the law i use steam/uplay/ea/ whatever” people a place to vent…… Go ahead rag on “pirates” all you want, you fools seems to beleive it more than us. My computer seems bit coin free to me along with the 1000’s of others :D been playing this awesome game few days before you, and you know what! i will probably buy this.
Small price to pay for a free game!!! ARRRRRGH….
Its ubisoft who planted the malware, so hopefully everyone will scare and buy the original.
A bitcoin miner or crappy Uplay? Which one would you prefer?
Bitcoin miner, all the way, and I buy a LOT of games…
Just not ones that have been infected with UPlay or Origin.
I was gonna get this until i went online to buy it and saw they were selling different versions with more missions for more money. Whatever happened to selling a full game for a single price? It all started with the horse armour selling downloadable content crap for oblivion and now every company thinks they can gouge more money out of us by deleting some levels or content from a game and asking us to pay more for it.
Well they can F*** right off as far as i’m concerned, i’ll get it by other means. I’ve done the same with multiple other titles that i felt were ripping me off. I will add that i’ve also gladly spent my money on titles i thought were not.
scare tactics LOL
Given the option to have a bitcoin miner or UPlay/Origin on my system I think I’d rather have some cycles siphoned off to support anyone who is willing to poke Ubisoft and EA in the eye than give even a penny to publishers who think it’s okay to screw their paying customers with craptastic third-rate DRM schemes.
can u link me the torrent???
if it is on any website…or could u atleast give me the HASH???
I doubt the torrent in question is still in circulation on any major torrent site. It’s been a number of months since the story broke.