Settings -> Indexers -> Pick one -> Fail Downloads -> Select “Executables” and “Potentially dangerous”
You still have to remove the malware from your torrent client, but at least sonarr will give up importing it and try a different torrent.
Cool to see someone pull this kind of malware apart. Interesting read.
I have been using cleanuparr to automate this. I have exes blocked in the download client and then cleanuparr sees they aren’t being downloaded and removes them and triggers another search.
What torrent sites are affected?
Technically, all* could be. They’re just indexing the torrents that are out there.
*all = the ones that would list TV shows, etc. of course
Lime and eztv were the culprits for me, I removed them from automatic search in *arr
The author getting pissed every step of the way is really funny, great write-up!
I blacklist just about anything executable from downloading in Qbit but it stills feels a little clunky, I wish the ARRs would inspect the torrents and immediately ignore the .exe ones before they even hit Qbit, I feel like it should be a default option to help the Newbies out.
Imagine trusting Torrents when Usenet is right there.
Imagine paying for pirated content, when high quality torrents are right there
Hold on, even if you’re using torrents, you still have to pay for a decent indexer right? Or has stuff changed in the last few years?
No, most public ones are fine. Always have been. I’ve never used a private tracker and have had very few issues. Especially after using Radarr, etc. to pick out good and bad torrents.
Search lists in qbit are how most people manage.
I personally use torrentleech which is a private tracker but has basically everything and super permissive rules. Very very easy to maintain ratio and to also get invited and started. I have 4.8TB of upload credit. Searching in qbittorrent or manually across public sites took too long for me when i usually want to find a higher res or higher bitrate version of something. I also always saturate my download speed even with only a few seeds since they’re almost always seedboxes.
I’ve been at this since Napster was a thing, so imagine my surprise to hear that folks are paying to pirate.
Usenet I get, but private trackers? only real benefit would be a risk reduction of being caught by your ISP, but that’s easily overcome by using a VPN.
VPN and public trackers gets you more shows and films than any human could ever consume. I’m not sure why any other method exists.
The two main benefits I’ve seen of private trackers are that you avoid the issue in the OP which happens all the time on public trackers, and that shows download in seconds.
Not sure how helpful they would be if things weren’t automated. I just have things set up so my Jellyfin users can request shows and they get downloaded automatically.
But with that said, “private” doesn’t mean it costs money, just that it requires an account (and usually that is an application process). It means they can kick people off for uploading things they shouldn’t.
Many indexers have donations optional, or a points system today. The tradeoff is that invitations are now even rarer and harder to get.
Torrents are pretty terrible without private trackers. Since majority of free sites have no access to an API and require prowlarr/jacket to create one, a cloudflare slover to bypass bot protections and even then it’s janky.
If you use private trackers, you now have to keep seeding downloads to keep your ratio healthy, and require additional trickery to allow files to be seeded after sorting by sonarr.
Usenet is plug and play, as the indexes are built with this functionality in mind and it’s far less likely to run into malicious uploads, as there is curation occuring on the paid indexes, ie, they are insentivised to make the paying customer happy.
I have been using private trackers for 15 years now and have been extremely happy with them. I dont mind seeding back, plus not all of them have the ratio requirement. My tv show site knows it would be very hard to keep that from slipping so instead of ratio its just a certain length for episodes and season grabs. I really dont care about keeping my bittorrent app running since i leave my pc on anyway. As for sonarr it just copies the file to the new directory and renames it, after a few months ill do a cleanup that takes 2 min.
As for usenet, my coworker loves it but he definitely says it has issues which may or may not be an issue today or workarounds for it? He has said the takedown requests are so fast now that finding a lot of stuff that releases quickly can be difficult if you dont use sonarr or radarr to grab right away. Every now and then he has to ask me to find stuff.
The only real issues ive ever had is the instability where sometimes theres outages and not much you can do. I remember last year or maybe year before that one of the biggest had a 2 month outage and things looked bleak.
I was also flabbergasted when I observed this. No idea why this is not default, but you can configure
"Fail downloads" = "Executables", "Potentially dangerous"in the Indexer options to prevent these downloads. Enable advanced settings first.I think this isnt a thing with prowlarr, is it?
I use Prowlarr, but had to configure it in Sonarr. I don’t see any option for it in Prowlarr
It is, I’ve seen it. People upload .exe files pretending to be an episode day before it’s release. Prowlarr will find those and start downloading.
Are people running the arr stack in windows?
Also frustrating that sonarr won’t allow you to NOT auto search for an episode before it’s released. It auto downloads WAY more garbage than early releases in my experience. In fact I’m not sure I’ve seen it actually download something successfully before it’s official release.
But searches online show sonarr devs pushing back against it for some unknown reason.
I believe the v5 sonarr beta has this feature. So it’ll be on the main branch soon enough.
The indexer option is a thing in prowlarr?
If so, I havent seen it.Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. I haven’t check if that option is in prowlarr yet.
Good find, thanks! Kind of annoyed I can’t set those values in Prowlarr to automatically propagate to all the *arrs, but still good to have the option once Prowlarr indexers are sync’d to other apps.
I know that qBit has an “excluded file name” option so just add *.exe to it.
Yeah they had this enabled without knowing it
qBittorrent marked it “finished” two seconds after adding it with total_downloaded: 0, so nothing actually landed on disk. No idea why. Don’t care. Thanks qBit.
Think .exe is the default value but you can add more
.bat, .vbs, .ps1: “it’s showtime”
Add .js, .url, .com, and .lnk to that list too.
And .scr
I’ve been hit by this a few times recently too. No ill effects other than needing to clear it from the queue thankfully.
I don’t know why you are annoyed by this.
You use an automatic tool. It’s bound to fail or make a mistake once in a while.
The “uploader” likely knew this, so they had some fun. It’s not like what you are doing is legal or anything. “Le me go complain on my blog about someone messing with how I do my illegal activites”.
I don’t know why you are annoyed by this.
I don’t read it as annoyance. It’s a rundown of them tracking down who is doing it and what it actually is. They’re just flagging for it.
This seems like a one off for them, but for me whenever tracking ongoing TV series I would regularly get malicious files as they appear before the real ones, and get found and downloaded by sonarr.
These days I only automate from private trackers, and enable a public tracker for an interactive search only if something can’t be found on the private trackers.
My problem is that it’s hard to stay in good standing with private trackers while using the *arr suite. I leave everything seeded for weeks, but I never get close to 1.00 ratio on any of the files. It’s not a connectivity issue AFAICT because I do have SOME people connected and downloading from me, but by the time the torrent reaches that point where there’s hundreds/thousands of seeders, I’m still running at a big deficit.
Oh on private trackers it’s hard to keep a genuine ratio like that. Instead they typically assign points for time you spend seeding, and you use those points to “buy” upload credit that counts for your ratio.
Many private trackers have a requirement to log in every X months so occasionally I just go log in to each and spend all the points.
The private trackers, I am looking at going back to te high seas but the cost of some of the trackers and usenet sites are high, then a debrid and I am kijd kf back where I was.
Are there dcent free private trackers?
Most good trackers can be used completely free of charge. But you have to work your way up to them, proving yourself as worthy on a lower tier tracker.
There are plenty of guides on this. Most recommend starting with an open interview on RED or MAM, then using the invite forums once you qualify.
You can also watch for open sign-ups. TL opens its doors a few times per year (and usually during December), and it’s at least as good as the public trackers. Sometimes these have invite forums, but usually not. TL does not.
You will, however, want to spend money on a VPN with port forwarding. This should run ~$30/year.
I have been using seedpool for a while after the othrr tracker i used shutdown. I like them mostly because i dont need to worry about ratio. As long as you seed everything you download you’re good.
Edit: it’s apparently not allow to give invites to people who ask
I’m not asking for a invite
MaM tightened their invite forum requirements quite a bit. They ‘found out’ that a ton of users were just there to use it as a springboard.
As annoying as this is, I agree. It’s a case of automate better or add a confirmation layer to the download decision.
The reason I don’t auto-DL anything yet is cos I’m too lazy to spend hours making sure it’s setup correctly.
I remember spotting this when the Mario Galaxy film came out. The top seed was a 2GB exe.
I hope we come full circle and we get “Avril Lavine - Girlfriend.mp3.exe”
I hope we get “Full Circle - No Doubt.mp3.exe” :)
There was a GTA6.exe that appeared on the torrent sites around the time of the first gameplay video leaks, I’m sure it got a few people.
