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Torrenting on Linux (leminal.space)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I used to torrent a lot many years ago, before the rise of streaming services, and back then relied on what people told me: you don't have to worry about malware when you have a Mac.

I've been thinking about torrenting a few things that are pretty much unobtainable any other way but I worry about the security aspect. I've seen people say that with Linux there's no need to worry but simply trusting this seems careless to me now and I wanted to ask your views on this.

Do you torrent and are there any additional precautions one should take? Thank you :)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I only torrent video, audio and epub files. For those as long as your player is up to date you should be fine, nobody is going to burn a 0day on you.

Now if you torrent executable files it is a different matter. Mac and Linux malwares exist, they are just a lot less common. You should try to find a trusted source, public trackers are not one. And you could restrict and monitor the program to see if it tries to do suspicious things. By running it in a sandbox like firejail or preventing it to access the internet with your firewall, you could use a tool like opensnitch to see where it tries to connect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It would only concern video files in my case and maybe audio and epub in the future. Okay, thank you for your input :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

You didn't need to worry about those on any platform.