[Coder-san]

Xunlei - a BitTorrent service primarily used in China and backed by Google - was caught spreading malware to both Windows PCs and Android devices


A Google-backed file sharing service was discovered distributing malware that affected both Windows PCs and Android devices. Photograph: Dale O'Dell/Alamy


A Google-backed file sharing service has been discovered spreading malware to thousands of Windows and Android users.

An investigation by security company Eset has revealed that Xunlei has been spreading malware named “Win32/Kankan” to Windows and Android users, signed with the company’s security certificate.

The malware is classed as a Trojan, and only affected Chinese users, according to Eset.

“The company officially admitted during a press conference that some of its employees have used company resources to create and distribute this program. The degree to which Xunlei Networking Technologies is implicated is hard to tell from the outside,” said Joan Calvet from Eset in a blog post.

The Xunlei software is very popular in China and has about 30% of world BitTorrent users, making it the most used BitTorrent client for the service, which allows peer-to-peer file sharing. The BitTorrent protocol breaks each file to be shared into small chunks and sends them across the internet between computers. Parts of the complete file can be hosted on many different computers, and the whole reconstructed by pulling the parts from different machines.

Read Full Article: Google-backed BitTorrent client spread malware to Windows PCs and Android devices - theguardian