With a 97% verified popcornmeter rating on Rotten Tomatoes and continued commercial success at the box office, Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ has become something of an entertainment sensation. Unsurprisingly, it has gained immediate interest from scammers and other threat actors looking to profit from its popularity. Stefan Dasic, a senior malware research engineer at Malwarebytes Labs, has issued a warning after analyzing threats specifically targeting people looking for illegal pirated copies of the movie. “Piracy-adjacent malvertising and fake-movie droppers persist because they don’t need to be sophisticated,” Dasic said, “they only need a title popular enough to guarantee search traffic.” And The Odyssey is most certainly that. “If you’re downloading a film and it asks you to install something, fix your browser, or run an .exe,” Dasic concluded, “you’re almost certainly not getting a movie. You’re downloading software that could infect your computer.”
The Odyssey Pirate Scams Strike At Breakneck Speed
The speed at which such threats emerged is hardly eyebrow-raising to be honest, after all the hype around The Odyssey had been building for quite a while. Plenty long enough for threat actors to get prepared, which is why Malwarebytes Labs was able to uncover two scams literally within hours of the movie opening. Although you might have reason to be unmoved by the plight of people searching to get hold of an illegal, pirated download of The Odyssey, the fact remains that lots of people take this route to the latest entertainment releases. As such, scammers are making the most of the hype surrounding the film itself, and the desire amongst those users to get hold of a free copy as quickly as possible. The irony being that what Malwarebytes found wasn’t “infected” movie files; indeed, no actual pirated films were involved. Instead, what the attackers involved were doing was “simply taking advantage of people searching for a popular new release,” according to Dasic.
The takeaway here is that the act of searching for dodgy movie downloads, be they of The Odyssey or another movie, can be just as dangerous as the actual download itself in terms of the malware risk. “The scams involve fake browser warnings and fake movie downloads that are actually malware,” Dasic explained, adding that “downloading a file with an .exe extension is never a safe way to watch a movie.”
In the words of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus in Hill Street Blues, let’s be careful out there. I know from conducting straightforward searches for The Odyssey, not specifically for pirate downloads, that malvertising is currently rife. I have seen multiple links to what appear to be hijacked legitimate domains that are offering pirated versions of the movie. “Recognizing that a ‘movie’ ending in .exe is never really a movie remains one of the simplest and most effective security checks users can make themselves,” Dasic has said. But I’d even better advice: don’t follow any links for pirated copies of The Odyssey. You know it makes sense.