Fake torrents are nothing new, but the latest one that claims to be a leaked copy of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs packs a Bitcoin miner, which is currently not being detected.
Watch Dogs is Ubisoft’s one of the most anticipated open-world hacking game slated for a launch tomorrow, include a file buried inside the game’s install files called “Winlogin.exe,” in disguise as a legitimate process to turn the gamers’ PC into a covert Bitcoin miner.
According to the SlashGear report, already thousands of computers have been infected, reporting blue screen crashes, random restarts, additional power consumption and an overall unstable machine.
Users report up to 25 percent of their PC resources being taken up by “winlogin.exe” process (not to be confused with the legitimate “winlogon.exe”) and “itc.exe” which is the Bitcoin mining program.
This is not the first instance of a Bitcoin miner being packed into a game as previously Grand Theft Auto V’s pirated and fake torrent copies also carried a similar malware.
The torrent version in question is a fake SKIDROW copy of the game, one of the most seeded Watch Dogs torrent copies that has been downloaded thousands of time.
Users who have illegally downloaded the cracked versions of Watch Dogs‘ PC version from a torrent service are advised to conduct a full virus scan. However, the Bitcoin miner is not recognized as a virus as of now, so it’s possible that the anti-virus program doesn’t pick it up as malware or virus. A close examination of all the current processes in the system is recommended to make sure if the system is infected by such Bitcoin miner.
