14 DAY TRIAL // Some of the users who visited KickAss Torrents in the past days have been greeted by a nefarious popup ad that was trying to scare them into calling a phone number to help them secure and protect their data, as The Register reports.
KickAss Torrents, the main pirate site where most of today's Internet users download their torrents, has a monthly user count of over 300 million visitors.
This is why, when a malvertising campaign hits a site of this caliber, security experts take notice, and this time around, The Register's Vulture South team was the first to discover the new scareware campaign that is currently underway, in the form of a popup ad shown to users first landing on the site.
The ad was asking users to call a phone number to have their personal data such as photos, credit card details, and passwords protected from an unknown security threat.
As it turns out, in order to better scare users, the ad was designed to look like the classic Windows blue screen of death (BSOD).
A call center operator was trying to convince callers to grant him access to their computer
The Register's staff followed suit and called the phone number that showed up on their screen, and they were greeted by a man sporting a bad English accent, claiming to be from technical support.
The call center operator tried to convince the caller to download and install the Supremo remote desktop control client, an application similar to TeamViewer, which would allow the call center operator to take control over the user's computer.
The operator ended his call when the Vulture South team revealed their true identity and tried to bribe him in order to reveal information about his employer.
Trying to get at the bottom of this campaign, the Vulture South team managed to track down the ad to the good-karma.info domain, registered in Panama, a country in which many malicious domains are regularly registered under the cloak of anonymity.
The malicious ad was removed from KickAss' website.