Office 2010 Torrents Full of Viruses?
According to Microsoft, there’s a lot of reason to worry. They have announced in their Technet Blog that they had been closely watching several Office 2010 Download sources and found plenty that were infected.
Well, Office 2010 Download .com Crew decided it’s time to have a look at it ouselves …..
So here are the results after downloading a total of 7 torrents of Office 2010 Technical Preview from ThePirateBay
Kaspersky Anti-Virus: all 7 clean
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus: 5 clean, 2 infected
AVG Free Edition: 6 clean, 1 infected
Conclusions?
Well, given that after some further analysis it was clear that the “infected” parts belonged only to the bundled cracks and not to the installer itself, and that the “infection” itself can possibly be simply the fact that anti-virus companies are big friends with large corporations and label known cracks as viruses (don’t get us wrong – we did not launch those files and neither do we suggest you to do so when your antivirus tells you not to!), we think that:
- While Microsoft’s statement about lots of torrents being infected is maybe a little bit over-rated, the threat certainly exists and one should be very careful when dealing with such downloads.
- It’s always good to pay attention to which part of the torrent is infected, as more often than not you don’t need to re-download the entire package but just a part of it.