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Pirate Matryoshka

Posted: May 2, 2019

The Pirate Matryoshka is a peculiar piece of malware that is being spread via fake torrent uploads on the infamous torrent tracker ThePirateBay currently. Torrents being used to propagate malware is not recent news certainly since this has been the case for years, and anti-virus companies have warned users about the dangers of pirating on numerous occasions. Remember that downloading pirated games, software or media is not only illicit, but it also may expose you to corrupted files that can cause all problems with your computer.

This malware serves several purposes, but the most interesting of them is the fact that it can hijack ThePirateBay accounts and use them to upload fake torrents that contain new copies of the Pirate Matryoshka malware. This is done via a fake authentication window that the victims might see when they download one of the bogus torrents – if they enter their login credentials in the fake window, the data may be transmitted to the attackers, and they are likely to use it to create new booby-trapped torrents. This step might seem useless, but the attackers can make their uploads seem more trustworthy by using old and trusted accounts instead of newly registered ones.

But how do the Pirate Matryoshka’s authors benefit from all this? The answer is pretty simple - Pirate Matryoshka is not the only thing that arrives in their specially crafted torrents. They also may bring a large portion of Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) to the user’s attention – usually, the installers of these tools can be stopped, but this is where the Pirate Matryoshka’s auto-clicker module comes into play. When the user interacts with one of the fake installers included in the torrent, the Pirate Matryoshka malware may tick all checkboxes and confirm the installation immediately, therefore making it impossible to stop the process. If the users are not paying attention to their monitor, they may not even notice that PUPs are being installed on their computers.

The software that the Pirate Matryoshka brings to PCs may vary – system optimizers, codec packs, dodgy Web browsers, and suspicious media players are just some of the programs that this attack may bring. Thankfully, there were only a few cases in which the Pirate Matryoshka was seen bringing threatening programs to the computers of its victims, but this does not mean that it should not be considered to be a severe threat certainly.

Protecting your computer from the Pirate Matryoshka can be an easy an automated task as long as you use a trustworthy anti-virus program that gets updated regularly.

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