A post appearing on the BitTorrent blog states that at around 4:20 AM PDT yesterday (7:20 AM EST), the uTorrent.com web servers were compromised and the standard uTorrent software for Windows was replaced with one of those fake antivirus scareware programs. At around 6 AM PDT, BitTorrent took the web servers offline to deal with the issue, and as of this blog post, the servers are back up and everything seems safe again.
The scareware that replaced the Windows uTorrent software was called Security Shield, which does the usual affair of launching on its own and claiming a virus has been detected on the user’s system, followed by prompting the user to pay for the full version of the software in order to remove the fake detected virus. Anyone who has Windows and downloads things has likely dealt with, or at least knows someone who has dealt with, this kind of scareware, and knows that scareware tends to be more of a nuisance than an actual threat. However, if one downloaded the client from uTorrent’s servers yesterday between 4 AM PDT and 6 AM PDT (7 AM EST and 9 AM EST), they should scan their computer and make sure everything is par for the course. There are a few scanners that make the process a bit easier when dealing with scareware, one of which can be read about here.
(via Techmeme, BitTorrent blog)
