Watch Dogs torrent installing Bitcoin miner on unsuspecting pirates' PCs

Jos

Posts: 3,073   +97

Watch Dogs isn’t officially out until this Tuesday, May 27, but the highly anticipated game has already made its way into the hands of some gamers -- either through retailers breaking the street date or leaked copies on torrent sites. If you are among the latter group you might be in for a surprise.

According to numerous reports, one or more versions of the Skidrow torrent circulating across peer-to-peer networks is hiding a Bitcoin miner. The installer apparently loads two exe files onto a victim’s machine, winlogin.exe -- not to be confused with the legitimate Windows process winlogon.exe -- and ltc.exe.

Infected machines then dedicate a portion of their CPU and GPU cycles in the background to break down complex algorithms and earn some Bitcoins for whoever is behind the scheme. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous reports of dropped computer performance and crashes from pirates.

Games such as Watch Dogs are a particularly interesting target for Bitcoin thieves given the anticipation behind it, and the hefty hardware specs required to play the game on high settings -- which will come in handy for mining.

Those who downloaded the repacked torrent are advised to look out for the aforementioned processes using Task Manager. And of course, buy the real deal instead, which is coming out May 27 for PC and consoles.

We’ll have our usual CPU/GPU performance review ready for you soon.

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Lol. 'watch dogs' game gets pirated. pirates need watch dogs to guard them against the pirated game's built-in bitcoin miner.
 
Due to the review embargo until day of release, the overall underwhelming reviews so far. Plus the lack of any demo and the difficulty involved in returning PC games.

I suspect ubi is trying to pull a fast one. And am glad of the opportunity to try before I buy.
 
Due to the review embargo until day of release, the overall underwhelming reviews so far. Plus the lack of any demo and the difficulty involved in returning PC games.

I suspect ubi is trying to pull a fast one. And am glad of the opportunity to try before I buy.

Wait I have not been paying attention to the reviews of this game, are they really saying its not very good? I guess im going to look this up and see whats what.

Edit: Oh wow a couple 7's from the independent sites, guess its not living up to the hype after all, I still will probably grab a copy.
 
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I gotta say this is a very clever way of getting a miner onto systems... but at the same time it is a bit douchey.
 
Due to the review embargo until day of release, the overall underwhelming reviews so far. Plus the lack of any demo and the difficulty involved in returning PC games.

I suspect ubi is trying to pull a fast one. And am glad of the opportunity to try before I buy.

What?! To start, your first sentence makes no sense or is incomplete, you're talking like demo's are the norm, and "returning" PC games have always been a problem since they require keys to be entered during installation, and/or are tied to the original installers' email account.
 
What?! To start, your first sentence makes no sense or is incomplete, you're talking like demo's are the norm, and "returning" PC games have always been a problem since they require keys to be entered during installation, and/or are tied to the original installers' email account.

All you just did was reiterate the points I made.
 
Who told you that?? There were no bitcoin miners in cracks, well actually people only said that for 3DM release. I didn't find anything suspicious, nor anyone else that I know. Steam006 "patch" doesn't have any virus nor RELOADED version, everything is working great.

I bought game after I played for like 30min, but damn they need to fix that stupid car handling, it is retarded.
 
"hefty hardware specs", the game doesn't even look so great, barely an improvement over last gen console games.
 
I think the actual reason behind the dearth of AAA titles is greed and laziness, in that order and on both sides of the cash register.

Greedy companies who want more money and don't want to pay higher wages, coders and designers who demand retarded wages for their work and publishers who can't seem to make enough money ever (EA) who resort to all manner of cost cutting and profiteering have learned that lazy brained apologists and consumers with low standards will pay them for anything they turn out as long as it's properly hyped.

Some game developers have worked out methods of getting paid AHEAD of doing any work at all (crowd funding). It's pathetic.

I hope the gaming industry crashes so greedy capitalists can shove off and leave the game making to game makers who code for the love of it and, subsequently, turn out better quality games.
 
I wonder what miner they used? Cgminer is quarantined by Avast and possibly many other anti-virus scanners.. then again there are a lot of people around that don't use antivirus.
 
Serves them right for pirating the game early in my opinion. Game companies work hard on making a game like this just so some people can illegally pirate it and then we wonder why we can't get more AAA titles on the market.
LOLZ you took the words out my fingertips! Serves them right indeed!
 
All you just did was reiterate the points I made.

Your first sentence still doesn't make sense. Due to the embargo early reviews are poor???
Beta's/demos are available for a handful of AAA titles.
Returning/selling PC games has always been hard/impossible
 
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Your first sentence still doesn't make sense. Due to the embargo early reviews are poor???
Beta's/demos are not available for every title.
Returning/selling PC games has always been hard/impossible

My first sentence was, "Due to the review embargo until day of release"

Ubisoft have decided that this game will have no official review until the game is for sale.

That means you must buy the game before you know if its good or bad. If ubisoft have so little confidence in their own product why should anyone else?

Its a lot easier to cancel a pre order than return a crappy game after all?
 
My first sentence was, "Due to the review embargo until day of release"

Ubisoft have decided that this game will have no official review until the game is for sale.

That means you must buy the game before you know if its good or bad. If ubisoft have so little confidence in their own product why should anyone else?

Its a lot easier to cancel a pre order than return a crappy game after all?

That does not explain how your sentence reads. It's borderline bad english or just bad sentence structure. No I'm not grammar police, it just doesn't make any sense.
Review embargos are NORMAL! This is not news to anyone.
 
That does not explain how your sentence reads. It's borderline bad english or just bad sentence structure. No I'm not grammar police, it just doesn't make any sense.
Review embargos are NORMAL! This is not news to anyone.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Due to the review embargo until day of release

I appear to not be alone in my opinion. Note the lack of the words watch dogs in the search terms and the presence of the words watch dogs in the results.

If your still having trouble reading and understanding simple english language I suggest you take some lessons instead of blaming other people for your problems.
 
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OMG I know what an embargo is. That isn't what was suspect in your original comment. It's what you said after that in the same sentence, followed by the crap you said after that.

Hell. If it does not make sense to you I can only apologise on behalf of the education system in your area.
 
Serves them right for pirating the game early in my opinion. Game companies work hard on making a game like this just so some people can illegally pirate it and then we wonder why we can't get more AAA titles on the market.
That's only a scapegoat and there are factual reports abound how they're severely inflated. It's because there are not as many consumers, so they deem it an unworthy investment, which makes no sense because they are still making money (my business principals say go for even if I only make $5,which is opposite of the big guys). If any of it were true, then why would any publisher/developer make a game for PC? There would be virtually nothing.

Piracy exists on the consoles too, which I know everyone here is aware of. With the amount of console owners, it's likely there's a comparatively large amount in that user base too.
 
So, they're hacking your computer, for downloading a hacked copy of a game that's about hacking everything. Seems perfect to me.
Inception

The funniest thing would be if some websites actually compared the performance between the official copy and the pirated one. If anything, it would bring awareness to the issue and drive more sales.
 
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