Catch a torrent of trouble

It's a part of my job to put myself in my customers' shoes and try to figure out what they want from a computer support company.

This is trickier than you may think. What seems inanely simple to me might be agonisingly difficult for someone else, and because our clients have different skill levels, my job is that much harder.

For an experiment, I tried to do what any normal bloke would do: I Googled "naked women". After clicking a few links, I found myself checking out pages touting software.

It appears the porn and "warez" (illegal software) trades go hand in hand. Perhaps they think middle-aged men surfing for booty are also into buying cracked software, though in my experience (as a tech), it is mainly teenage boys who download dodgy software, hence my experiment.

Having found a bunch of sites, I searched for a piece of software I already own - a website editor that costs $39.95. I followed some links and they all pointed to a site that wanted me to pay $5. For this, I would have unlimited access to software on their servers. Call me old fashioned, but paying five bucks for software worth $40 can't be kosher. And there was no way I was going to give them my credit card number.

Like any teenager, I went back and started clicking around again and, after a few minutes searching, found what I wanted. It appears all I needed was "torrent" software and I could download stuff free.

Torrents are files distributed across the internet by millions of users. Torrent software does two things; it opens up a "shared folder" on your machine, giving access to other torrent users, and enables you to download your chosen warez from those other user's shared folders. The basic idea is that files any user in the network downloads are made available to all other users in the network.

For example, my newly downloaded "pirated" web editor was now shared, and any other people looking for it would find it and download a tiny part of it from my shared folder, some from someone else's folder and so on, until they had all the bits, and reassemble them into one file.

You may have heard of programs like Kazaa, eMule and Limewire. Everything from TV shows to the latest music and movies are available on their networks. So, it is legal?

Not by a long shot, which is why I uninstalled the torrent software as soon as I had finished my downloading experiment, making sure everything was gone and no "security holes" were left open.

Though these networks flourish, downloading from them is theft, depending on what you download. I'd like to think because I already owned a licence for the software I downloaded, I was OK. Wrong; most end-user licence agreements state that making the software available via peer-to-peer networks is illegal. Besides, downloading anything without paying is obviously illegal, and morally wrong.

I scanned my download with the latest version of AVG; all clear. I installed it and immediately all sorts of warnings informed me that my homepage was being changed; applications were trying to access the internet and several processes were attempting to place themselves in the start-up areas of Windows. Yikes!

Something in that torrent file was infecting my machine. After unplugging my network, (to avoid infecting the whole building), I noted filenames in the warning dialogues and frantically started searching. I found eight "droppers" and tried to delete them. No go; they were being used by Windows. After restarting in safe mode, I managed to delete a couple of them, but most had been integrated into Windows.

When Windows started, the viruses ran with it, and there was no way I could delete the infected files within Windows. I booted my machine using a bootable DVD, and, after mounting the drive, scanned it with several scanners, picking up 14 infected files.

I had to manually remove many other suspect files and edit the registry to remove viral hooks. Even then, after restarting Windows I still couldn't find one particular process that almost had me tearing my hair out. Purely by luck I found the rogue process, which was disguised as a valid Windows system file. Interestingly, no virus scanner flagged it as a threat. Once removed, everything returned to normal.

What a way to spend an afternoon - if I had to pay for the clean-up, it would have been hundreds of dollars; all for a $40 piece of software.

I hope you get the moral of this story. I did.