Hundreds of video game pirates generously donated their computer resources to malware authors by downloading “Repacks” of infected games, which contained digital currency mining software.
Microsoft researchers identified dozens of torrent files infected with malware, which had been downloaded thousands of times and continued to be shared or uploaded by attackers, victims, or seedbox servers.
According to experts at the Redmond-based Malware Protection Center, the infected torrent listings were introduced as “repacks” – pirate terminology for torrent uploads that fix bugs in previous listings.
The infected torrent listings included the deluxe edition of WatchDogs, Don't Starve, the premium edition of King's Bounty: Dark Side, and two versions of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
These torrents were rated as good or trusted on some torrent sites by anonymous community members, however they infected users' computers with Bitcoin mining software, specifically TrojanDropper: Win32/Maener.A.
The malware ran in Windows environments in the form of the following processes: connost.exe, minerd.exe, svchost.exe or winhost.exe, so as not to be detected.
