Cyber criminals are using new episodes of popular TV shows to distribute malware, with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Arrow being their favourites.— Photo HBO

Cyber criminals are using new episodes of popular TV shows to distribute malware, with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Arrow being their favourites.

These and other findings are in a new report from Kaspersky Lab titled ‘Game of Threats: How cybercriminals using popular TV shows to spread malware’.

TV shows are among the most popular means of entertainment, but with a rise in torrents, online streaming and other methods of digital distribution, they often suffer copyright infringement. In many places, such programmes can now be consumed through illegal channels such as torrent-trackers and illegal streaming platforms.

Unlike legitimate resources, torrent trackers and hosted files might send a user a file that looks like an episode of a TV show, but is in fact malware with a similar name.

According to Kaspersky, leading the list in 2017 and 2018 was Game of Thrones. In the latter year it accounted for 17 per cent of all infected pirated content, with 20,934 users attacked, followed by The Walking Dead with 18,794 and Arrow with 12,163.

The malware distributors opted for the first and the last episode of each season to include their malicious content.— VNS