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.
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.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… 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
TBF this isn’t a revival of some 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.
/s
how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
I mean i just joined a private tracker and so I don't have to think about it. Several, actually. It's hard for me to imagine someone taking torrenting seriously enough to set up an arr stack and not belong to a private tracker. Beyond malware, there's the rightsholder spies on the public trackers, and I'm not trying to lose my ISP over copyright strikes.
And i also truly cannot understand what your point is. Trackers are not really legal, they come and go. I don't think a few hundred or even a few thousand HN users joining across the ecosystem is going to suddenly cause them all to get raided
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.
> 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...
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.
https://trash-guides.info/
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
TBF this isn’t a revival of some 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows
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.
The whole sticky notes next to monitor is not a joke. I bet you could grab some crypto recovery keys this way
I’m as upset as OP, get a job skid.
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.
let's all join a private tracker!
that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.
/s
how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
And i also truly cannot understand what your point is. Trackers are not really legal, they come and go. I don't think a few hundred or even a few thousand HN users joining across the ecosystem is going to suddenly cause them all to get raided
Scammers always have a new trick up their sleeve.
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...