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It is just 4 days to the premiere of the final season of the hit show Game of Thrones and as is tradition a lot of malicious intruders will be ready too.
The show commands attention unlike any ever seen all over the globe and many of its fans will seek to access it through illegal downloading from queer sites and torrents. This includes people who live outside the US who cannot access HBO’s services (all of us) and those who cannot afford to pay for streaming services like ShowMax.
Well, keep in mind that this really excites hackers who cannot wait to take advantage of this and manipulate people into thinking they are getting the episodes when they are actually downloading malware into their systems.
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This has been proven by a research done by Kaspersky Lab, which revealed that there were over 10,000 types of malware related to the show last year (mind you, there were no new episodes aired last year) and hackers tried to infect the users’ computers about 120,000 times.
This is how much they are willing to go with these hungry fans that will stop at nothing to have timely views of every single episode. Numbers show that the show had surpassed other rivals becoming one of the most used shows to spread viruses and worms into the torrent world coming up to 17% of all infected content that was illegally accessed that year.
If that does not scare you, note that within two years, Kaspersky identified 33 types and 505 different groups of malware risks hiding behind the Game of Thrones name. With the kind of anticipation that the world has for season 8, it will not be a wonder to see those digits double up and rise some more compared to previous seasons of the show. What fascinates, even more, is that these statistics only apply to Kaspersky users last year meaning that the real logistics globally were much larger than this. It is interesting to note that the hackers sneak their filth mostly with the first episode of the first season of Game of Thrones that people still try to get to this very day.
I know you are dying to watch the final season (I can’t wait either), but risking your computer is not really worth the trouble. Let us not apply shades of grey and just view it as it is; do not download the episodes of the show and even other hit shows through torrents this time. It does not really hurt to watch in a safe and legal way through streaming services and subscribed channels.
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