Was your computer system infected by virus due to P2P software?

P2P is commonly used today worldwide to download and share files. The best example I can give is of torrent site. But some practiced made this illegal by sharing commercial content for free. Like software, movies, music, games, etc. This is kind of a great loss to the IT economy, but still this is rocking around web. After introduction of various laws to prevent it, I can notice some of the website are blocked by ISP itself. Anyhow everyone wants to be in fair practice. We had see what happen to megaupload. My motive to make this thread is to find out that what amount of people are infected at the time of sharing content on P2P. I can assume that would be more than 90%. As virus are distributed with crack, keygens and patched software. This is are cheap tactics by people who are involved in various mal practices. Vote if you are infected due to P2P software. If no then it would be much better if we can share some safe techniques.

To understand that first you need to learn what are the kinds of risk involved in P2P applications. I vote for yes as I am too infected a number of time while downloading certain software's from torrent. That is really a cheap practice because somehow you are going to affect your system. That is reason why companies releases demo or trail version of software's so that people can enjoy some part for free. The first risk that is most common is malicious software. Free programs shared on P2P network comes with malicious code. This malicious code modify your system files and even rob information. They are used by attackers to receive information and hack larger network. They are distributed in the form of trojan, malware, etc. Some year ago we were not fully aware about infections. But as the time passes on people realizing the threat of using such stuff. Second thing when you use any such tool in your system you are simply exposing your system to attackers. Your ip is pulled on web and your system lie open for attack. P2P applications are carrier of this threats. They are designed in such a way that a unknown user can never find out what is going out with system. They are program to find sensitive information like bank details, credit card information, etc. Also this P2P applications open ports which are blocked by firewall. Ports are like doors of your system which when are open, virus enters openly. You cannot even understand how this happen and your files are shared over internet.

I was infected with a virus when I download a operating system. I thought what is much better to than getting a paid operating system for free. But I did not realize that it was infected. After installation within few week my system behaved weirdly. I was on wan network which was shared by many people in my building. All got affected. To avoid such thing I purchased a commercial license dvd which is far more secure.

You might enjoy of having free movies or software from such thing. But that is very risky. Are you aware that using or downloading such type of software comes under legal penalty. Attackers just want access to your data. Their motive is to trouble people. Virus are created and they are shared around the world via such tools. First it enters in your system and then in those which are on the same network and so on they keep on expanding. I do not really believe on P2P tools. The most fierce problem I faced when my entire network was filled with adult ads. I had downloaded a movie which came with some .exe file. The readme file told to install that first before playing the movie. I did the same. Later on I found that there are weird icons on the screen. Those are some chat tools based on adult content. The same then entered in all pc on the network. The last option was to reformat each and every system and re-install everything from scratch. My file server was infected and all folders were corrupted. I had paid an nice amount to recover all.