Anti-virus companies flag ‘uTorrent’ as harmful even as Google Chrome blocks its official website

uTorrent flagged as harmful and malicious by top AV firms while Google Safe Browsing blocks its website.

The fight between torrents and tech companies is getting uglier even as we speak. Several top Anti-virus makers have begun blocking uTorrent after identifying the software as malicious or ‘potentially dangerous’.

To add to uTorrent’s woes, Google Chrome is currently blocking several pages on uTorrent’s official website like utclient.utorrrent.com. The same is being flagged under the Google’s Safe Browsing norms based reports the popular file-sharing application is linked to riskware and trojans.

Both the above actions will be a big blow to uTorrent, which apart from being the best bittorrent client around, is downloaded in millions every month. The client is also the main source of revenue for the San Francisco based company BitTorrent Inc. The uTorrent client dashboard shows ads and comes with bundled software which generates huge revenues for the parent company.

uTorrent is being flagged by big security software vendors like ESET and Symantec and many others. The scanning result below from VirusTotal shows that at least six anti-virus applications are flagging uTorrent as malicious or potentially dangerous.

The anti-virus engines associate the uTorrent.exe file with Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT,  while some of them are flagging the highly controversial OpenCandy bundling software used by Bittorrent.

uTorrent has been flagged earlier also but only by some solitary anti virus software but this is the first time that almost all top AV are flagging it.

 Google Safe Browsing hitting torrent websites hard

Google had promised that it would be harsh on websites that contain unwanted software/malware/ malicious software from this month onwards. Earlier Kickass Torrents was its first victim and now uTorrent is also being blocked by Google in several ways.

When users attempt to download the latest stable release of the torrent client, Chrome flags the software as malicious and pops up a warning even as it blocks the software download. Though some users have reported that they can download the client without facing any issues.

Google is also actively blocking several pages that link to uTorrent and other BitTorrent Inc. software. Google lists following issues with uTorrent website as per its Safe Browsing standards :

These and the other uTorrent threat reports all seem to be triggered by bundled third-party software that uTorrent and Bittorrent are using. As of now other than flagging them as malicious, AV makers have not come out with any official statement of the clients themselves being malware carriers.

Bittorrent is yet to come out with a official comment on the above issue.