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> Not even a folder with a fake .mkv and a "codec installer" next to it like the "good old days". Just the exe. Are we deadass.
We can thank Microsoft for their willful support of criminals by having file extensions be hidden by default in Windows.
I rarely use Windows these days but that is the first setting I always change. MacOS hides a lot of them too by default, sadly.
And it's even on by default on Windows server builds. :|
Most users nowadays don't even know what file extension is
.
I've heard horror stories of recent generations not understanding files and directories, or even how to use a search engine.
Tell me if you are using "directories", "cabinets/drawers", "folders" or "collections/projects/groups/vaults" and I can tell about this person's technical background. :-)
It doesn't help that Windows has hid file extensions since 7.
Nope. Try 95.
for executable files, unix has always been rid of file extensions.
(please don't feel the need to point out how you can use more words to say more, that's always true, our goal here is to use less words, no need for extensions to that)
Ehhh been a lot longer than that, if memory serves.
> Are we deadass.
As someone who remembers Napster being new, I am happy to see the kids rediscovering the real joys of Piracy!
As opposed to OSs that use an invisible execute bit?
Not really relevant to the discussion.
But I do personally agree, that better extensions (e.g. for exec files) in Linux would be a really good thing. I have the same gripe with Linux's case sensitivity of files and dirs. Fine if you want to make the file name more legible by using CamelCase or something, and this needs to be displayed as such. But it's madness that one directory can have the files with the same exact name (case written notwithstanding).
Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS. Not saying that we should bring it back or anything.
Of course it is relevant. It's not like other OSs make it more visible: the x bit is invisible. Bashing Windows for making it invisible without an alternative is just populist point scoring on HN. I guess the x bit is less likely to be transferred over BitTorrent although it wouldn't surprise me if there was some extension for it like there is for ZIP files. (BEP 0047 seems to cover the x bit).
Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
Still waiting on this https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329
Good stop-gap in that thread: https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329#issuecommen...
That'll be good for new installs down the line, but I don't think it's something to "wait on" right now. I have around 30 indexers configured in Prowlarr, but going into Sonarr/Radarr and just changing the no-executables setting for each indexer that's actually active only takes a minute or so and never gets reverted.
30 indexers!? I’m seriously behind the curve with my 2. :-)
Are many of them highly specialized? Just lots of redundancy?
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
No. I’m a casual arr stack user with general trackers only and had two episodes be exes yesterday.
This is also happening on UseNetCrawler, not just torrent sites.
Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.
You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.
I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.
I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :( the only thing I would still say it's worth it if you find super niche private trackers with stuff nobody else has, like cinemageddon
> bad habit
I wouldn't consider a requirement that people to upload as much as they download a "bad habit" it's called not being a leech.
It's not 2008 anymore. People want to upload and can, but can't when there's 20 seedboxes for a torrent with one leecher.
if your "private tracker" lets you pay for upload, it's a scam site and not at all a trusted tracker in the community lol
If you are too lazy to join private trackers, at least use TraSH guides to set up quality profiles
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
You shouldn't pay money to join TL but otherwise, yeah.
For 99% of users who want to download TV shows/music/movies, The Pirate Bay is enough. I don't understand why you'd ever pay for a private tracker or Usenet unless you're looking for obscure/old stuff.
I don't understand why you'd use completely unmoderated and full of malware TPB instead of a competently run public tracker like 1337x
Because 1337 is behind Cloudflare meaning the Sonarr stack can't use it properly
i bet youd pay for the top trackers if you actually knew how good they are. cool thing is, if you put in the time and effort, even the top trackers are free.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene
TBF this isn’t a revival of some arch 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open…
That's why they called private? Nice thing about private trackers is that you can just download without VPN (with DHT off...). Downside of private trackers, you get banned for weirdest thing, like my seed box was offline while I was out of country on vacation, I didn't download or seed anything for two weeks and got banned. Newsgroups are much better.
They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.
>or you have to pay to join (lol!)
Why lol? Still better value than paying the IP holder what they want. And maintaining well curated torrent platforms costs money.
> or you have to pay to join (lol!)
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining your ratio.
Ok, I have not indulged in the new paradigm of work your way to the interesting stuff. I just did occasionally dabbling back in the day, but I wonder: I fully understand the intent of making a prospective good citizen demonstrate commitment and the level of service-side management effort to make this social network paradigm work.
But isn't this sort of structure just completely transparent to [Nation|Narco]/State Actors? Feel free to widen the set of economically interested actors.
How do you scale video interviews?
I think I am missing something about this scene. I really want to dive in tho.
Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.
I used private torrents for the best part of 10 years but life got in the way, and when I tried to go back after my last Pvt torrent closed (Morethan..) I realized the bar was much higher than before. I only managed to get into MAM and perhaps and some point that would open more doors and so on, but it's anything but trivial lol (unless you never lost access to Pvt torrents or maybe if your friends do)
for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
> they also maintain ratios
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
A good private tracker will give you upload credit for keeping the torrent seeded even if no one downloads.
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I'm on them for over 10 years. Last time I've cared about ratio was 9.
idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.
That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.
My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.
Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.
It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
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Does this website have a *.nix translation?
s/lazy/poor/
This event is probably related to ITorrent (a torrent hosting site) being compromised, it was hosting a very similar malware:
https://threatcluster.io/cluster/itorrentsorg-compromised-to...
For a while all torrents downloaded from that site where replaced by a torrent of simple exe, it disguised itself by using a directory icon, plus having 800M of padding to simulate a real torrent.
> It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????
The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way
I'm glad someone actually took the time. I've been running into this for weeks and it as thinking to myself isn't this a rather silly and old trick to be bringing back.
Mainly with new Mobland episodes.
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Ran into the same issue, I created a small program that scans qbittorrent with their API and removes torrents that contain these file extensions and aren't downloading https://git.sbstp.ca/sbstp/qbittorrent-sentinel
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
It's kinda funny because Windows Defender will catch some of these as Trojan:Win32/Ravartar!rfn
I find it funny that great minds think alike because I was just thinking of analysing these EXE files this week and doing a quick writeup at medium:
https://lazherrera.medium.com/analyzing-that-exe-file-youre-...
Defender automatically removes malware (or more correctly, game cracks it thinks are malware) the second it hits my disk from my torrent client.
But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows
This is what the anti-piracy companies do to try and dissuade people from torrenting. Just create a custom rule to give .exe files a -1000 weight and never worry about it again.
> I chopped the 118 KB off the front and threw it into IDA
How long until someone uses AI to find an exploit in IDA and starts putting that in their malware, so that if you try to disassemble it you get pwned?
An .exe? Doesn't everybody run their *arr stack on Linux? Well, that's what I do at least. Even so, crap like this has to be easily blockable. And I wouldn't mind if there was a service that handled that for everybody.
Yes but it’s a torrent, the target isn’t Sonarr, it’s manual downloads.
Ince I discovered usenet I rarely want to deal with torrents
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
Age isn't such a big deal if you get a block account with a different backbone.
Sonarr could have ignored those EXE filetypes, no?
I run regular reviews with my AI, it's added quite a lot of rules to stop this happening. Though I have this all on linux, but still.
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times.
It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
No, that's to exhaust sandboxing without being able to trust sleep() or time API calls by the only way you can: generating heat.
The new sonar version v4 has made it even more easy to get around this. But yeah. You can configure sonar better
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
You can still manually download a torrent, open it in your client, and then open the file in VLC.
You can also automate 99% of it with the *arr stack and completely forget about it.
What is the issue? There is more choice now?
You don't need any of the *arr stack, they just make media management easier for us hoarders with huge libraries. I couldn't imagine maintaining a collection of thousands of TV shows and movies without them. Every single arr program is a progressive enhancement over the "once upon a time" stack you mention.
Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.
For what it's worth I agree with you. I've never understood the appeal of these bloated apps.
It works great. Family loves being able to self serve media requests.
Blame copyright laws.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
An excellent read. Thank you. I enjoyed it!
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.
The same happens for other series as well! I was frustrated with it!
Good thing you decompiled this monstrosity
> WHO is actually falling for this in the big 2026????
some 13 year old on his dad's Dell
Haven't seen this on usenet so far. Wonder if its more torrent prone.
Got this in my sabnzbd instance and had to do .exe rules there too. An exe in a linux container…very smart.
I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
The setting works on filenames, not titles.
> Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc.
This is literally one of the advice points at the end of the article. Did you get that far?
Yeah, this whole post felt like some weird deja vu from 25 years ago on a web forum. "Bastards are putting malware exe's on file sharing, wtf??"
Join a private tracker and never think about it again
yeah!
let's all join a private tracker!
that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.
/s
how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
> a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again
I don’t agree with that framing.
All metadata has been preserved and published, and the sucessor sites to what.CD have long outgrown it; and their successors will again. Anything you find missing, you can request and typically it will be filled within less than 24 hours.
I mean i just joined a private tracker and so I don't have to think about it. Several, actually. It's hard for me to imagine someone taking torrenting seriously enough to set up an arr stack and not belong to a private tracker. Beyond malware, there's the rightsholder spies on the public trackers, and I'm not trying to lose my ISP over copyright strikes.
And i also truly cannot understand what your point is. Trackers are not really legal, they come and go. I don't think a few hundred or even a few thousand HN users joining across the ecosystem is going to suddenly cause them all to get raided
This has been a thing since torrents have existed.
Skill issue. Configure your Sonarr better.
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...
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"Just a gaming channel"
Is this a joke? Who’s upvoting this? It should be titled “I didn’t even bother asking an LLM to configure my server”
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
How the author *asked Claude to reverse engineer the exe
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You don’t block it in qbittorrent, you let it download and then get sonarr to block the torrent when it detects an exe.
And also, stop posting claudeslop. We know it’s claudeslop. You tried really hard to modify it and conceal it, but you can’t fool a sloprunner. So please, just write your own fucking article. It’s like 4 paragraphs long.
It's Claude with a "slang+profanity" filter lol. The cadence is so tired and grating.
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
I don't know how to explain this style exactly. I think it's supposed to sound grizzled or cynical or jaded or something. It reads like they're trying to do an impression of Tracer Bullet from C&H:
> Yeah, that's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye.
Anyway, it's amusing when Bill Waterson does it but when I'm hoping to read something interesting about how malware is implemented it's a little less fun.
Weird, I didn’t feel as though it attempted to hide that it was AI written at all. In fact, it is so cliche-ly Claude written it comes off as a parody.
> malware
> you let it download
Sounds like a terrible strategy to me
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AI written?
Are you using The Pirate Bay, which is unmoderated? Otherwise why wouldn't your tracker have quickly deleted this?