Game Of Thrones season 7 online streams hit record numbers, amid torrent virus fears

GAME OF THRONES remains hugely-popular with online pirates, new figures from piracy monitoring firm Muso have confirmed.

Game Of Thrones season 7 episode 1 has triggered a surge in online illegal streams, new figures from piracy monitor Muso seem to suggest.

According to the latest statistics from the anti-piracy firm, some 90 million people tuned-in for the premiere of Game of Thrones season 7 illegally.

Must claims 77,913,032 people watched Game Of Thrones season 7 episode 1 via "streaming portals”.

These sites typically host videos on their own pages, like YouTube, and are clearly more popular than downloads.

Torrents were still reasonably popular, according to Muso, with the likes of The Pirate Bay and other similar sites accounting for a modest 8,356,382 downloads.

Downloads from private websites – members-only websites that require an invite before users can access the contents – made up 4,949,298 downloads, according to Muso.

Geographically, the United States appears to be the biggest offender, with 15,075,951 views.

Meanwhile, the UK was placed second – with some 6,252,903 pirate viewers.

Earlier this week, Finder.com published a study that claimed 3.7 million Britons are planning to illegally watch the hit HBO fantasy show without paying.

One in five – some 21.2 per cent of the 2,000 British adults surveyed – admitted they plan to tune-in illegally by downloading, streaming or borrowing an illegally-obtained copy from a friend.

According to the data, 61 per cent of millennials will watch the new season, but one in three will not pay for the hit show. More men will watch the show illegally than women.

Finder CEO Jon Ostler said: “The number of people planning to illegally download the new Game of Thrones season is surprising, but it’s not a shock that it’s a much higher number than in the U.S.

“This high piracy rate could be a result of the price of subscription services, or could just come down to the ease and convenience of having your own copy for free.

“No matter how tempting it can be to do whatever it takes to keep up-to-date on your favourite series, piracy remains a serious offence.

“There are a number of services which offer GoT as soon as it comes out.”

Last year, a terrifying computer virus targeted Game of Thrones fans on torrent site The Pirate Bay, capitalising in the surge in popularity caused by the launch of the show.

Following the season 6 premiere last year, ransomware was introduced on The Pirate Bay to coincide with the influx of users looking to download Game Of Thrones episodes.

A fraudulent advertiser on The Pirate Bay used a pop-under advertisement to quietly redirect users and infect them with Cerber ransomware.

Security firm Malwarebytes discovered the threat, which used a victim’s vulnerable browser plugins to silently download a malicious payload to a system.

"Popular torrent site The Pirate Bay was serving ransomware via a malvertising attack this week-end.

"The ad network changes but the modus operandi remains the same," Malwarebytes security researcher Jerome Segura said.

What made this ransomware so dangerous was the fact that users could become infected without even clicking on anything on the website.

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Pirate Bay has re-entered the 100 most-visited websites worldwide for the first time in three years

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The malicious malvertising campaign stealthily identified and attacked vulnerable browsers, targeting all users not running script blockers with the Pirate Bay ads, according to Malwarebytes.

Security Specialist at ESET, Mark James said: "Most users associate being infected by going to a dodgy website and downloading a dodgy file, or browsing a website and choosing to download a file that is bad.

"However, when presented with a scenario that’s capable of infecting them without any visible interaction on their behalf, the end user is often baffled by ‘how it happened’.”

The news comes as The Pirate Bay this month regained a spot amongst the 100 most-visited websites worldwide for the first time in three years.