Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
You don’t block it in qbittorrent, you let it download and then get sonarr to block the torrent when it detects an exe.
And also, stop posting claudeslop. We know it’s claudeslop. You tried really hard to modify it and conceal it, but you can’t fool a sloprunner. So please, just write your own fucking article. It’s like 4 paragraphs long.
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit.
Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
Still waiting on this https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329
Joining private trackers is hard only if you are trying to join the niche ones which is totally unnecessary if you are trying to watch relatively recent and popular movies.
Just get into a decent general tracker and you'll literally never have this issue again (along with getting torrents with more seeders and better tagged content so your "4k" download will never be 480p again)
The new sonar version v4 has made it even more easy to get around this. But yeah. You can configure sonar better
If you are too lazy to join private trackers, at least use TraSH guides to set up quality profiles
https://trash-guides.info/
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
Does this website have a *.nix translation?
s/lazy/poor/
> It even grabs your Sticky Notes for WHAT????
The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way
https://github.com/cleanuparr/cleanuparr
Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
It's kinda funny because Windows Defender will catch some of these as Trojan:Win32/Ravartar!rfn
I find it funny that great minds think alike because I was just thinking of analysing these EXE files this week and doing a quick writeup at medium:
https://lazherrera.medium.com/analyzing-that-exe-file-youre-...
Defender automatically removes malware (or more correctly, game cracks it thinks are malware) the second it hits my disk from my torrent client.
But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
Skill issue. Configure your Sonarr better.
> XOR a global. XOR it back. Do nothing. Hundreds of times. It exists purely to make the decompiler output look like shit, and it does, congrats.
No, that's to exhaust sandboxing without being able to trust sleep() or time API calls by the only way you can: generating heat.
You don’t block it in qbittorrent, you let it download and then get sonarr to block the torrent when it detects an exe.
And also, stop posting claudeslop. We know it’s claudeslop. You tried really hard to modify it and conceal it, but you can’t fool a sloprunner. So please, just write your own fucking article. It’s like 4 paragraphs long.
Who forced you to read the fucking article ? Pretentious fuck
It's Claude with a "slang+profanity" filter lol. The cadence is so tired and grating.
> malware
> you let it download
Sounds like a terrible strategy to me
Sonarr could have ignored those EXE filetypes, no?
The same happens for other series as well! I was frustrated with it! Good thing you decompiled this monstrosity
Ince I discovered usenet I rarely want to deal with torrents
As someone who still pays for usenet, the benefit of torrents is anything older than a couple of days, since stuff gets pulled from usenet servers almost as soon as it's posted. Of course, if you have everything pre-configured to find and grab everything you're interested in, you won't even notice, but sometimes I just get an itch to watch something older off the cuff, and that's where torrents shine.
Haven't seen this on usenet so far. Wonder if its more torrent prone.
Got this in my sabnzbd instance and had to do .exe rules there too. An exe in a linux container…very smart.
I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.
It's by far the most common on public torrent trackers, but I occasionally see it on usenet too. Never bothered to check which indexers they tend to come from.
Welcome to piracy, you must be new here. This has been occurring for some time, I've seen it for years to occasionally find a media named exe to delete and manually redownload.
Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.
An excellent read. Thank you. I enjoyed it!
I got sick of this shit a few weeks ago, so now as soon as the torrent client starts downloading an executable it removes the torrent. Definitely seems to be an increase recently.
This has been a thing since torrents have existed.
Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc. It’s been this way for years. You do have to clean out qbittorrent every few days so that sonarr will search again, so that’s a pain. But hey, I’m pirating media. Someone trying to scam me at the same time is expected.
> Tell your downloader (in my case qbittorrent) to not download .exe, .scr, .zip, etc, etc, etc.
This is literally one of the advice points at the end of the article. Did you get that far?
Plenty of my iso's intentionally contain those names though. Really, sonarr / radarr should have implemented this a long time ago since they're the ones doing the searching, downloading, and inspecting of files: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/pull/8775
Using settings on the indexer isn't great since with Prowlarr the user doesn't actually interact with the indexer portion of Sonarr.
Doing it in release profiles by bumping down their score is a cute workaround but then the torrents will just stop saying ".exe" in their title.
Really it's a thing Sonarr have to do, as evidenced by the multiple PRs they have to try and finally do it.
Join a private tracker and never think about it again
Yeah, this whole post felt like some weird deja vu from 25 years ago on a web forum. "Bastards are putting malware exe's on file sharing, wtf??"
> But you put the address in the malware anyway so what's the point for fetching from Gist and YouTube????
The ability to change it, dude. Have you never written a malware before?
Often a primary concern is the security response, so you want redundancy for the ability to work around enforcement action, such as website takedowns.
Hardcoding a scapegoat into the malware itself also buys you time, so that the first enforcement action is less likely to spend your backups right away.
> And to whoever made this: you probably spent weeks or shit ton of tokens on ChaCha20, AES-CTR, runtime API hashing, anti sandbox scoring, Chrome app bound encryption bypasses, just to make a shitty skid malware.
People have been making infostealers that support hundreds or thousands of different apps and corners of your computer for decades. Plenty of vendors pride themselves on it.
Meanwhile you used LLM to write a bunch of your article, and seemingly to do the RE too...
Is this a joke? Who’s upvoting this? It should be titled “I didn’t even bother asking an LLM to configure my server”
the interesting element of the article for me wasn't "somebody put malware on a torrent site", it was how the author reverse engineered the .exe to see why the file ended up there
How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in.
Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client!
And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
You can still manually download a torrent, open it in your client, and then open the file in VLC.
You can also automate 99% of it with the *arr stack and completely forget about it.
What is the issue? There is more choice now?
It works great. Family loves being able to self serve media requests.
Blame copyright laws.
Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright.
But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer.
After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically.
As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.