There were other shows likely to give you an infection too, showing just how popular they are. In all, the researchers found 33 different types of threats in the torrented Game of Thrones episodes.
The 'Winter is Coming' episode of Season 1, the very first of the whole show, is the most dangerous. In fact, the study showed that the first and last episodes of each season were the most likely to contain malware, probably because hackers know users trying out the show before committing are likely to torrent. It's from a global total of 120,000 infected users last year. And that's in a year when the series didn't have a single new episode. It turns out that last year, Game of Thrones had the highest infection rate, hitting a total of more than 20,000 users. They focused on movies and TV shows used as the medium for the infections.
And those fans are about to get one heck of a nasty surprise.Įarlier this week, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky released a report on torrents and how hackers are using them to infect people with malware. Of course, some of them can't wait for the episodes to debut one by one, so they're going looking for torrents. We're on the cusp of Season 8 of Game of Thrones, and fans are super excited.
