A pirate’s life for me? Well, certainly for somebody out there. If you’ve been around the world of piracy for more than about a day you’re probably already familiar with the fact that sometimes they 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. Seems 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.
One eloquent 4chan user describes his experience with the pirated 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, the game officially releases on May 27th, 2014.
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.
