New Torrent Malware Posing As Movie File Can Replace BTC & ETH Addresses: Researcher

In the latest Bitcoin news, we are focusing on the scams – particularly one malware – which is posing as a movie file on the torrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) and manipulating web pages and replacing Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) addresses, according to the computing magazine Bleeping Computer and its research on January 12th.

The malware which is originally thought to inject advertising on Google and in search results is found to perform multiple actions, some of which were discovered by the publication’s own researcher Lawrence Abrams.

“What appeared to be an ad-injector into the main Google search page turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg,” the researchers warned.

The file also contains malicious code posing as a movie file on TPB, specifically for the movie “The Girl In The Spider’s Web.”

In reality, the malware is also able to swap out cryptocurrency wallet addresses for ones owned by the attacker. This occurs when users copy and paste using the Ctrl + C function on Windows PCs and has appeared previously in other malware.

“This tactic does not show any sign that could alert the user of the trick. Because the wallets are a large string of random characters, most users will likely not notice the difference between what they expected to copy and the pasted result,” Bleeping Computer continued.