Anyone who chooses to visit pirated sites to download movies or songs should pay attention to this news. A study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University found that the more time we spend on pirated websites, the greater the risk of coming across malware .
This research was conducted over a period of 12 months by Professor Rahul Telang of CMU, who monitored the browsing habits of more than 250 participants in the Security Behavior Observatory.
The operators of exploitative pirate sites are usually unaware that advertisers and users with malicious content use such sites to distribute advertising messages or malicious software. This is something you may already know. But what is the actual risk we face?
Telang writes in his research brief: “Specifically, the doubling of the time spent on pirate sites causes a 20% increase in the number of malicious programs”.
While other categories of websites, such as social networks, online stores, video games, gambling sites, or even adult sites, did not show the same result.
“Even after classifying malicious software files as adware and removing them from analysis, our results indicate that there is a 20% increase in the number of malicious programs due to visits to pirate websites”.
The most concerning fact was that regular visitors of pirate sites usually did not have antivirus protection software installed on their systems.
Although there are no specific indications that malware spreads primarily through pirate sites, the research concludes that the average number of malware files found on a pirated machine is 1.5, compared to 1.4 for users who never visit any pirate website.
As users continue to download content for free and illegally, these risks could deter the fervent followers of pirate sites from using them.
