Are you habituated to watch pirated movie content? If that’s the case, then you are not only at risk of falling in the eyes of the law enforcement, but you are also pushing your PC towards malware infections.
Note- In countries like Canada, United States, UK and some parts of Australia, downloading and streaming pirated movies is illegal as per the prevailing laws. Adding to it is the new risk which was discovered by Europol in association with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in Alicante, Spain.
According to a research carried out by Europol, users are putting their PCs at risk of being infected by malicious apps when they visit websites to watch pirated content.
Researchers claim that malware enters the PCs when a user watches a pirated content or plays a game on a compromised gaming portal. It then starts accessing the personal info stored on the computer or device and then starts transmitting the info to remote servers.
The official European Union (EU) study says that the malicious files discovered by the security experts came from sites and mobile applications suspected of sharing pirated films, music, video games, and TV shows. And most of them were designed in tricking users to reveal their credit card details, social networking logins and other personal data like mobile phone numbers and email IDs.
“Only half of the digital natives agreed that they consider the safety of a site when accessing content online”, said Christian Archambeau, acting Executive director of the EUIPO. Rest of them are either not aware of the risks or do not care about what happens next.
EUIPO findings of the research were published in the first official EU study on the risks of malware infection from suspected copyright-infringing websites. The study claims that the web portals containing malware were mostly hosted on servers located in the US or Canada.
