Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
That'll be good for new installs down the line, but I don't think it's something to "wait on" right now. I have around 30 indexers configured in Prowlarr, but going into Sonarr/Radarr and just changing the no-executables setting for each indexer that's actually active only takes a minute or so and never gets reverted.
But I do personally agree, that better extensions (e.g. for exec files) in Linux would be a really good thing. I have the same gripe with Linux's case sensitivity of files and dirs. Fine if you want to make the file name more legible by using CamelCase or something, and this needs to be displayed as such. But it's madness that one directory can have the files with the same exact name (case written notwithstanding).
Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS. Not saying that we should bring it back or anything.
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.
You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.
I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.
I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :( the only thing I would still say it's worth it if you find super niche private trackers with stuff nobody else has, like cinemageddon
A few PT are getting much more lenient towards ratio, seeding time and other requirements (some used to ask you to meet certain upload "goals" in a quarter), seeing the trend and what's coming for them -- there is just less overall activity, including fewer torrents and less seeding/downloading.
Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.
Pay 10/mo for a seedbox, it derisks your life and is extremely handy. On most sites, you can download batch torrents freeleech and then get your ratio up by leaving those seeding for a while. I use this box for a bunch of stuff so I don't feel like I'm paying just for torrents
It takes a small effort up front to pick out some freeleech content and/or set up autobrr, then you pretty much never have to worry about ratio ever again.
There was always people trying to make $$ with piracy (I mean, didn't the tpb owner basically all became millionaire thanks to it ?), but I feel like in recent years it had become worse. It's likely because since the 2010' many countries (mostly “western” country tbf, but also Japan and now Korea) have become way more aggressive with hunting and prosecuting piracy services operator. So in a way, like with drugs, higher risk means that a lot of “in it for the love of the game” kind of people left the scene and only more, errrmmm "money focused" people stays.
You can also just run Bitmagmet for a few weeks and then you have your own tracker. (I think "tracker" might be technically incorrect jargon but it solves the same problem).
If anybody ask, it's not me who said it, but you can also easily use Shodan to find a lot of open Bitmagnet instances. Many people who self-host do not seem to be aware of the “questionable” decision of docker to always listen on 0.0.0.0 by default and make a firewall rule to expose your service to the entire web (you can also find instances of jackett and some *arr stack, but most of them are at least password protected).
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene
TBF this isn’t a revival of some arch 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining your ratio.
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.
Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.
for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well
idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.
For a while all torrents downloaded from that site where replaced by a torrent of simple exe, it disguised itself by using a directory icon, plus having 800M of padding to simulate a real torrent.
If it grabs all sticky notes, including those in the history, that might get a password or user account info that got pasted in a sticky note that got saved and not deleted
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
Bitmagnet has some good filtering to remove garbage like that but not great examples lying around ready to use. I bet an LLM can be pointed at the schema/docs and get you something useful setup though.
Cleanuparr uses the built-in Sonarr/Radarr blacklist feature, so if you encounter something where there's nothing to import, it will backlist the torrent. You can set it to cover stuck torrents too if you want, so it blacklists the "dead" torrents and will make Sonarr/Radarr move on and search again.
The blacklist feature of Sonarr/Radarr can be hooked into Prowlarr pretty easily so that the torrents get blacklisted all the way back there.
You should definitely add wildcard blocks to your torrent client too though for *.exe and similar so you don't even download them in the first place rather than throwing them away only after downloading.
You might want to combine this with something like Packarr too, unless you just want to blanket blacklist all archives (zip, rar, etc). Packarr will try to (semi-securely) unpack archives after download. If they fail to unpack (e.g. requires a password you haven't supplied, badly formatted, etc), the Cleanuparr will end up marking them as failed import and they'll get blacklisted and removed from disk.
Also, you should generally manually blacklist things in Sonarr/Radarr if you discover it's bad, rather than just deleting it from disk. That will also prevent the same thing from re-downloading.
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
It's also great at cleaning up build artifacts of software I'm trying to compile before I even have a chance to run it. Wow! It was also very cool when it interfered with git in a way it couldn't detect, so I spent 2 hours diagnosing a bogus FS error.
An .exe? Doesn't everybody run their *arr stack on Linux? Well, that's what I do at least. Even so, crap like this has to be easily blockable. And I wouldn't mind if there was a service that handled that for everybody.
Ran into the same issue, I created a small program that scans qbittorrent with their API and removes torrents that contain these file extensions and aren't downloading https://git.sbstp.ca/sbstp/qbittorrent-sentinel
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...
I guess I noticed this recently. I dropped into a TPB mirror because I was being lazy and saw the 'recent' torrent feed was filled with .exe files, all the same size, in every category. Grabbed one out of curiosity and threw it at Virustotal (I wasn't remotely interested enough to RE it), and VG said yup, it's a malware dropper (yes, I'm aware VT isn't exactly definitive proof).
Just thought "does anyone actually fall for that?", but I guess a few must.
How does the bittorrent protocol deal with removing bad torrents? I torrent from time to time, and luckily I've never come across malware; it seems the only way to avoid it is to not download a video with an exe extension.
It does not, the protocol just defines the way the bits are exchanged.
It's the torrent sites that can deal with bad torrents and your hunch is correct, the only way to avoid malware is not downloading suspicious torrents (or to be precise, not executing the downloaded files, downloading the torrent is not harmful even if the file is).
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
Best example of this is the IYKYK-io stack (not real name). 90% is a generic video watching system, then you just need one add-on from a different website to make it search torrents as the source for those videos.
I tried this but it did a ton of things wrong, and wanted me to wire up a bunch of stuff that I didn't specify. It also forgot cleanuparr and flaresolverararr or whatever its called. I'm sure I could get it there eventually with the vibes, but I gave up in disgust just like last time I tried.
Maybe if I made a VM dedicated just to this behind a VPN gateway, then let Codex go wild in that VM with no guardrails it could eventually get something working.
You don't need any of the *arr stack, they just make media management easier for us hoarders with huge libraries. I couldn't imagine maintaining a collection of thousands of TV shows and movies without them. Every single arr program is a progressive enhancement over the "once upon a time" stack you mention.
Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.
Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
I've already built my own ARR stack replacement that does away with this risk, handles anime better by integrating with anidb, and more... Got sick of the limitations.
I remember torrenting Tom Clancy's Endwar for the Nintendo DS. I downloaded the torrent, thought "the size is weird", unzipped the RAR file using the password on the site, and finding an executable instead of a ROM. I rolled my eyes and went to look for a different copy.
I'm glad someone actually took the time. I've been running into this for weeks and it as thinking to myself isn't this a rather silly and old trick to be bringing back.
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
The blog is trying hard to be very casual and written in an informal style but then you get some claudisms like "so nothing actually landed on disk" in the middle. I found it jarring to read.
This is what the anti-piracy companies do to try and dissuade people from torrenting. Just create a custom rule to give .exe files a -1000 weight and never worry about it again.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.
/s
how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
I don't know how to explain this style exactly. I think it's supposed to sound grizzled or cynical or jaded or something. It reads like they're trying to do an impression of Tracer Bullet from C&H:
> Yeah, that's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye.
Anyway, it's amusing when Bill Waterson does it but when I'm hoping to read something interesting about how malware is implemented it's a little less fun.
Weird, I didn’t feel as though it attempted to hide that it was AI written at all. In fact, it is so cliche-ly Claude written it comes off as a parody.
Media distribution companies are like health insurance companies (though not to the same degree) in that they can't stop themselves from squeezing their customers to the absolute limit. Majority opinion and the definition of ethical consumer behavior can change very quickly under those conditions.
Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
Still waiting on this https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329
That'll be good for new installs down the line, but I don't think it's something to "wait on" right now. I have around 30 indexers configured in Prowlarr, but going into Sonarr/Radarr and just changing the no-executables setting for each indexer that's actually active only takes a minute or so and never gets reverted.
2 replies →
Good stop-gap in that thread: https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329#issuecommen...
> Not even a folder with a fake .mkv and a "codec installer" next to it like the "good old days". Just the exe. Are we deadass.
We can thank Microsoft for their willful support of criminals by having file extensions be hidden by default in Windows.
I rarely use Windows these days but that is the first setting I always change. MacOS hides a lot of them too by default, sadly.
But on MacOS it doesn’t matter, right?
1 reply →
I'll never forget when they autorun everything on an USB. Good times.
Most users nowadays don't even know what file extension is .
I've heard horror stories of recent generations not understanding files and directories, or even how to use a search engine.
11 replies →
It doesn't help that Windows has hid file extensions since 7.
3 replies →
> Are we deadass.
As someone who remembers Napster being new, I am happy to see the kids rediscovering the real joys of Piracy!
Napster! I remember when you had to wait for your malware that you’d ordered from the back of a magazine to arrive by post, on floppy discs!
Of course, once it had collected your data, you had to post it back.
1 reply →
And it's even on by default on Windows server builds. :|
As opposed to OSs that use an invisible execute bit?
Not really relevant to the discussion.
But I do personally agree, that better extensions (e.g. for exec files) in Linux would be a really good thing. I have the same gripe with Linux's case sensitivity of files and dirs. Fine if you want to make the file name more legible by using CamelCase or something, and this needs to be displayed as such. But it's madness that one directory can have the files with the same exact name (case written notwithstanding).
Heck, I fondly remember my DOS days when directories and files were easily distinguishable, since the former ones were always written in CAPS. Not saying that we should bring it back or anything.
6 replies →
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.
You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.
I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.
I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :( the only thing I would still say it's worth it if you find super niche private trackers with stuff nobody else has, like cinemageddon
if your "private tracker" lets you pay for upload, it's a scam site and not at all a trusted tracker in the community lol
1 reply →
> bad habit
I wouldn't consider a requirement that people to upload as much as they download a "bad habit" it's called not being a leech.
3 replies →
A few PT are getting much more lenient towards ratio, seeding time and other requirements (some used to ask you to meet certain upload "goals" in a quarter), seeing the trend and what's coming for them -- there is just less overall activity, including fewer torrents and less seeding/downloading.
Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.
Pay 10/mo for a seedbox, it derisks your life and is extremely handy. On most sites, you can download batch torrents freeleech and then get your ratio up by leaving those seeding for a while. I use this box for a bunch of stuff so I don't feel like I'm paying just for torrents
1 reply →
Usenet is still better. I max out my gigabit connection for a few dollars a month.
It takes a small effort up front to pick out some freeleech content and/or set up autobrr, then you pretty much never have to worry about ratio ever again.
There was always people trying to make $$ with piracy (I mean, didn't the tpb owner basically all became millionaire thanks to it ?), but I feel like in recent years it had become worse. It's likely because since the 2010' many countries (mostly “western” country tbf, but also Japan and now Korea) have become way more aggressive with hunting and prosecuting piracy services operator. So in a way, like with drugs, higher risk means that a lot of “in it for the love of the game” kind of people left the scene and only more, errrmmm "money focused" people stays.
No. I’m a casual arr stack user with general trackers only and had two episodes be exes yesterday.
Consider paying for usenet or investing some effort over a month to get into some private trackers.
2 replies →
You can also just run Bitmagmet for a few weeks and then you have your own tracker. (I think "tracker" might be technically incorrect jargon but it solves the same problem).
If anybody ask, it's not me who said it, but you can also easily use Shodan to find a lot of open Bitmagnet instances. Many people who self-host do not seem to be aware of the “questionable” decision of docker to always listen on 0.0.0.0 by default and make a firewall rule to expose your service to the entire web (you can also find instances of jackett and some *arr stack, but most of them are at least password protected).
There's also my project that also crawls the DHT and other sources.
https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
This is also happening on UseNetCrawler, not just torrent sites.
If you are too lazy to join private trackers, at least use TraSH guides to set up quality profiles
https://trash-guides.info/
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
> they also maintain ratios
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
10 replies →
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene
TBF this isn’t a revival of some arch 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
1 reply →
> or you have to pay to join (lol!)
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining your ratio.
[0] https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Private_trackers
2 replies →
>or you have to pay to join (lol!)
Why lol? Still better value than paying the IP holder what they want. And maintaining well curated torrent platforms costs money.
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
A good private tracker will give you upload credit for keeping the torrent seeded even if no one downloads.
They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.
Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.
2 replies →
for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well
idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
[dead]
I'm on them for over 10 years. Last time I've cared about ratio was 9.
I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
4 replies →
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.
4 replies →
its not lazy. Some of us are very busy. This is stuff that agents can't vibe on their own.
Does this website have a *.nix translation?
s/lazy/poor/
You can join private trackers for free if someone invites you. Ratio and minimum seed times are requirements.
This event is probably related to ITorrent (a torrent hosting site) being compromised, it was hosting a very similar malware: https://threatcluster.io/cluster/itorrentsorg-compromised-to...
For a while all torrents downloaded from that site where replaced by a torrent of simple exe, it disguised itself by using a directory icon, plus having 800M of padding to simulate a real torrent.
> It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????
The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way
If it grabs all sticky notes, including those in the history, that might get a password or user account info that got pasted in a sticky note that got saved and not deleted
And seed phrases. I'm pretty sure it's mostly about seed phrases.
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
Bitmagnet has some good filtering to remove garbage like that but not great examples lying around ready to use. I bet an LLM can be pointed at the schema/docs and get you something useful setup though.
1 reply →
btdigg is fine? (on tor)
1 reply →
https://github.com/cleanuparr/cleanuparr
Since no one is explaining:
Cleanuparr uses the built-in Sonarr/Radarr blacklist feature, so if you encounter something where there's nothing to import, it will backlist the torrent. You can set it to cover stuck torrents too if you want, so it blacklists the "dead" torrents and will make Sonarr/Radarr move on and search again.
The blacklist feature of Sonarr/Radarr can be hooked into Prowlarr pretty easily so that the torrents get blacklisted all the way back there.
You should definitely add wildcard blocks to your torrent client too though for *.exe and similar so you don't even download them in the first place rather than throwing them away only after downloading.
You might want to combine this with something like Packarr too, unless you just want to blanket blacklist all archives (zip, rar, etc). Packarr will try to (semi-securely) unpack archives after download. If they fail to unpack (e.g. requires a password you haven't supplied, badly formatted, etc), the Cleanuparr will end up marking them as failed import and they'll get blacklisted and removed from disk.
Also, you should generally manually blacklist things in Sonarr/Radarr if you discover it's bad, rather than just deleting it from disk. That will also prevent the same thing from re-downloading.
The ecosystem is way too fragmented. Another app !!
Has to be, from necessity. If there's one big central site it's easy to shut down, so there have to be lots of small sites
2 replies →
This is the only thing which fixed this problem for me.
Jesus Christ, anotharr..
So thats what's been going on. I was wondering why all of a sardine my *arr stack started downloading executables.
I found the "ignore and blacklist executables" setting easily enough and moved on with my life.
But props to the OP for taking it this far!
Yeah that's definitely pretty fishy.
Brevity is the sole of wit.
I see what you did there.
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
It's kinda funny because Windows Defender will catch some of these as Trojan:Win32/Ravartar!rfn
I find it funny that great minds think alike because I was just thinking of analysing these EXE files this week and doing a quick writeup at medium:
https://lazherrera.medium.com/analyzing-that-exe-file-youre-...
Defender automatically removes malware (or more correctly, game cracks it thinks are malware) the second it hits my disk from my torrent client.
But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows
It's also great at cleaning up build artifacts of software I'm trying to compile before I even have a chance to run it. Wow! It was also very cool when it interfered with git in a way it couldn't detect, so I spent 2 hours diagnosing a bogus FS error.
Very cool Microsoft.
An .exe? Doesn't everybody run their *arr stack on Linux? Well, that's what I do at least. Even so, crap like this has to be easily blockable. And I wouldn't mind if there was a service that handled that for everybody.
Yes but it’s a torrent, the target isn’t Sonarr, it’s manual downloads.
> I chopped the 118 KB off the front and threw it into IDA
How long until someone uses AI to find an exploit in IDA and starts putting that in their malware, so that if you try to disassemble it you get pwned?
Maybe easier to find an exploit in sonar and patch it to rewrite everything it writes to disk into executables
That's not how it works!
Ran into the same issue, I created a small program that scans qbittorrent with their API and removes torrents that contain these file extensions and aren't downloading https://git.sbstp.ca/sbstp/qbittorrent-sentinel
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...
I guess I noticed this recently. I dropped into a TPB mirror because I was being lazy and saw the 'recent' torrent feed was filled with .exe files, all the same size, in every category. Grabbed one out of curiosity and threw it at Virustotal (I wasn't remotely interested enough to RE it), and VG said yup, it's a malware dropper (yes, I'm aware VT isn't exactly definitive proof).
Just thought "does anyone actually fall for that?", but I guess a few must.
How does the bittorrent protocol deal with removing bad torrents? I torrent from time to time, and luckily I've never come across malware; it seems the only way to avoid it is to not download a video with an exe extension.
It does not, the protocol just defines the way the bits are exchanged. It's the torrent sites that can deal with bad torrents and your hunch is correct, the only way to avoid malware is not downloading suspicious torrents (or to be precise, not executing the downloaded files, downloading the torrent is not harmful even if the file is).
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
You can still manually download a torrent, open it in your client, and then open the file in VLC.
You can also automate 99% of it with the *arr stack and completely forget about it.
What is the issue? There is more choice now?
Blame copyright laws.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
Best example of this is the IYKYK-io stack (not real name). 90% is a generic video watching system, then you just need one add-on from a different website to make it search torrents as the source for those videos.
Just ask your favorite LLM to set it up with Docker compose and you're done. It's really not too difficult.
Or, I don't know, make some application that combines all of them like https://github.com/rivenmedia/riven-ts
I tried this but it did a ton of things wrong, and wanted me to wire up a bunch of stuff that I didn't specify. It also forgot cleanuparr and flaresolverararr or whatever its called. I'm sure I could get it there eventually with the vibes, but I gave up in disgust just like last time I tried.
Maybe if I made a VM dedicated just to this behind a VPN gateway, then let Codex go wild in that VM with no guardrails it could eventually get something working.
You don't need any of the *arr stack, they just make media management easier for us hoarders with huge libraries. I couldn't imagine maintaining a collection of thousands of TV shows and movies without them. Every single arr program is a progressive enhancement over the "once upon a time" stack you mention.
Not that your old stack doesn't still work exactly how you'd expect it to, nothing's changed there.
Nothing is stopping you from doing it manually.
Or you could put in the work and end up with a system that will let a non-technical family member type the name of a show that comes out next week and it will automatically search, download, tag, and add every episode on release to a Jellyfin instance for them to watch.
It works great. Family loves being able to self serve media requests.
For what it's worth I agree with you. I've never understood the appeal of these bloated apps.
The appeal is automation.
1 reply →
how are they bloated exactly?
TIL the *arr stack has windows ports!
No idea. But any software that autodownloads from untrusted sources should NOT be run in an environment with information available.
My *arr runs in a Linux container on a VM, suggest you do the same.
Ince I discovered usenet I rarely want to deal with torrents
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
Age isn't such a big deal if you get a block account with a different backbone.
1 reply →
- i see your blog has a lot of posts on reverse engineering https://thereallo.dev/?explore=blogs
- as a guy whose s too broke to afford claude pro or gpt pro, i ask you
- what llm models have you tried to reverse engineer exe files or decompile or disassemble or whatever the term of the month is?
Sonarr could have ignored those EXE filetypes, no?
This has been a thing since torrents have existed.
Getting random scammy ads and occasional malware is what you pay for pirating. It was always like this.
"It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????"
People unironically put users and passwords in those.
Luckily I'm safe because I'm too busy to sit down and watch anything.
I've already built my own ARR stack replacement that does away with this risk, handles anime better by integrating with anidb, and more... Got sick of the limitations.
> WHO is actually falling for this in the big 2026????
some 13 year old on his dad's Dell
I remember torrenting Tom Clancy's Endwar for the Nintendo DS. I downloaded the torrent, thought "the size is weird", unzipped the RAR file using the password on the site, and finding an executable instead of a ROM. I rolled my eyes and went to look for a different copy.
I was 11 at the time.
I'm glad someone actually took the time. I've been running into this for weeks and it as thinking to myself isn't this a rather silly and old trick to be bringing back.
Mainly with new Mobland episodes.
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
No, that's to exhaust sandboxing without being able to trust sleep() or time API calls by the only way you can: generating heat.
>It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????
Because people very VERY often will stash passwords/account numbers/other commonly needed secrets in Stickies
My friend's wife stored her Windows password in one, because he told her to just write it on a Sticky Note.
He meant the physical kind.
Yeah, when she forgot her password the only hint was stored on the computer.
I am forbidden to laugh in her face every time I see her. He insists.
I run regular reviews with my AI, it's added quite a lot of rules to stop this happening. Though I have this all on linux, but still.
AI written?
Are you using The Pirate Bay, which is unmoderated? Otherwise why wouldn't your tracker have quickly deleted this?
The new sonar version v4 has made it even more easy to get around this. But yeah. You can configure sonar better
An excellent read. Thank you. I enjoyed it!
The same happens for other series as well! I was frustrated with it! Good thing you decompiled this monstrosity
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.
Haven't seen this on usenet so far. Wonder if its more torrent prone.
Got this in my sabnzbd instance and had to do .exe rules there too. An exe in a linux container…very smart.
I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.
[flagged]
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
[dead]
The blog is trying hard to be very casual and written in an informal style but then you get some claudisms like "so nothing actually landed on disk" in the middle. I found it jarring to read.
Feels like OP asked Claude "please rewrite to be more casual and gen-z" ...
I don't know why you got downvoted, I also noticed this and Pangram agrees this is fully AI-written.
This is what the anti-piracy companies do to try and dissuade people from torrenting. Just create a custom rule to give .exe files a -1000 weight and never worry about it again.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
The setting works on filenames, not titles.
Join a private tracker and never think about it again
yeah!
let's all join a private tracker!
that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.
/s
how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
2 replies →
> Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc.
This is literally one of the advice points at the end of the article. Did you get that far?
Yeah, this whole post felt like some weird deja vu from 25 years ago on a web forum. "Bastards are putting malware exe's on file sharing, wtf??"
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
Is this a joke? Who’s upvoting this? It should be titled “I didn’t even bother asking an LLM to configure my server”
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
How the author *asked Claude to reverse engineer the exe
"Just a gaming channel"
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
It's Claude with a "slang+profanity" filter lol. The cadence is so tired and grating.
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
I don't know how to explain this style exactly. I think it's supposed to sound grizzled or cynical or jaded or something. It reads like they're trying to do an impression of Tracer Bullet from C&H:
> Yeah, that's me, Tracer Bullet. I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop, and I pack a revolver. I'm a private eye.
Anyway, it's amusing when Bill Waterson does it but when I'm hoping to read something interesting about how malware is implemented it's a little less fun.
Weird, I didn’t feel as though it attempted to hide that it was AI written at all. In fact, it is so cliche-ly Claude written it comes off as a parody.
> malware
> you let it download
Sounds like a terrible strategy to me
[flagged]
Skill issue. Configure your Sonarr better.
I don't get it. Is this guy admitting of doing piracy? Is that like a thing you do?
Media distribution companies are like health insurance companies (though not to the same degree) in that they can't stop themselves from squeezing their customers to the absolute limit. Majority opinion and the definition of ethical consumer behavior can change very quickly under those conditions.
Reply to everyone, I wasn't criticizing the author, I was just trying to understand what's happening. I am an avid collector of Linus ISOs myself
You're posting on a site called "hacker news" and you draw the line at cartoon piracy?
It's a great way to watch whatever you feel like watching on whatever device, frankly I don't even know what are the alternatives.
If you continue to clutch your pearls like that, you'll break the strand.
who cares?