Security News > 2020 > February > Researchers reckon 500k PCs infested with malware after dodgy downloads install even more nasties from Bitbucket
Researchers claim more than 500,000 PCs have been left wriggling with malware after a cracked app went on to retrieve further nasties from Bitbucket repos.
We searched Bing for "Download Adobe" and right at the top of the page were videos with guides to illegal downloads; no, we did not test these for malware but it would not be surprising if they came with some unwanted extras.
Rochberger and Dahan reckon that some such downloads create a connection to Bitbucket repositories to install "Additional payloads".
There is no suggestion that Bitbucket itself has any specific vulnerabilities, but the claim is that serving malware from legitimate sites such as this - or others like Github, Dropbox and Google Drive - makes it harder for security software to detect.
The researchers said the repositories are "Updated almost constantly by the threat actor" in order to evade antivirus signature lists.