McAfee says piracy has tripled even in wake of Pirate Bay prosecution

The number of new piracy sites on the web has tripled in the third quarter, despite prosecution of the owners of the controversial Pirate Bay file-sharing web site, according to security software maker McAfee.

McAfee said it detected a 300 percent jump in the creation of file-sharing sites in the quarter. Some observers expected piracy to abate after the torrent site The Pirate Bay lost a legal battle in Sweden.

But piracy sites have multiplied, as has the amount of malware attached to them. Malware creators are creating the sharing sites to trick users into downloading copyrighted material — with malware attached. The sites sprang up to scam Pirate Bay users who were, at least temporarily, forced to look for a new place to download copyrighted material. The Pirate Bay site was down for just a day, then it was restored.

In its third quarter Threats Report, McAfee also said that web-based threats have reached record levels and that cybercriminals are extorting web site owners with threats of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that flood a site with traffic until it shuts down. McAfee benefits from rising malware, of course, so it’s motivated to play Chicken Little on malware growth. On the other hand, the rise of malware has been well documented by most people observing it.

McAfee predicts the number of these malicious pirate sites will increase during the fall and holiday blockbuster film seasons. Malware creators typically hide viruses and other bad stuff in pirated blockbuster movies.

The McAfee report also found that spam has reached an all-time high, with cybercriminals taking advantage of celebrity deaths and natural disasters. Spam was up 10 percent from the previous record set in the second quarter of 2009, and spam is now 92 percent of all email. Spam was up 24 percent from the third quarter of 2008.

Hackers are now targeting anyone who visits a malicious web page. They’re delivering their dangerous payloads via spam, phishing, social networks and even through redirects from hijacked legitimate Web sites. About 55 percent of all malicious URLs are hosted in the U.S., and cybercriminals are getting increasingly effective at utilizing search engine optimization techniques (tricks to steer users) to drive traffic to these bad sites.

In the last quarter, McAfee Labs saw some ransom attempts. Four Australian sports betting companies were taken down during key events like the football and rugby finals, resulting in millions of dollars of losses. Hackers are also commandeering lots of computers and using them in “botnets,” where they control thousands of “zombie” computers to attack sites. They even rent these botnets out for hire.