Pirated versions of Spider-Man: No Way Home were discovered to contain crypto-mining malware on torrent websites.

Virus is commonly detected through torrent downloads; recently, cybersecurity experts discovered a new type of virus that lurks beneath pirated versions of the Spider-Man: No Way Home film. spiderman torrent

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a worldwide box office success that has revived many people’s happy childhood memories of their favorite superhero. But those who download the most recent Marvel film in illicit copies are getting more than just nostalgia. Researchers have alerted us to the presence of bitcoin mining malware in the pirated files.

Reason Cybersecurity researchers have cautioned that downloading a pirated version of Spider-Man: No Way Home from a torrent source may invite a mining malware. Several pirated versions of the film that are being distributed online, according to the researchers, contain malware that can be used to steal cryptocurrency. It goes by the name “spiderman_net_putidomoi.torrent.exe.”

Once a system is compromised by malware, it may effectively take over its processing power and use it to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency known for its anonymity. Researchers at ReasonLabs write in a blog that the malware is “most likely from a Russian torrenting website.”

It doesn’t try to steal data from a target system because it is a cryptojacking virus. But in the end, it significantly raises the CPU utilization of a PC for mining cryptocurrency, which raises the electricity cost. Scientists caution that the miner slows down an infected device over time when it runs for extended periods of time.

The total number of downloads the malware has received is unknown to researchers. Nonetheless, they do note that the infection has been around for a while.

Finding the spyware is difficult. The researchers claim that after infecting a PC, the virus updates Windows Defender’s exclusions. Moreover, it starts a watchdog process on the victim CPU to carry on unmonitored mining. This indicates that any process that shares the names of its components gets terminated by the malware. In this manner, it guarantees that a single instance is operating at all times.

People should avoid obtaining this kind of content from unreliable sources, the experts advise. The blog points out that consumers can simply take precautions by making sure they are aware of what they are downloading by constantly checking the file extension. A movie file, for instance, ought to finish in “.mp4” rather than “.exe”. It is advisable for users to carefully examine the content they download as well as the source from whence it originated.