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Everyone needs a little distraction right now, and that often takes the form of movies and series.

Many are happy to Netflix and chill, or stream shows through legit channels and platforms, while others prefer to engage in a bit of piracy.

No judgement – it’s illegal, but so too is buying cigarettes or alcohol these days.

As lockdowns across the globe took effect, visits to pirating sites started to rise.

In the US, CNBC reports a 43% spike in the number of people pirating movies in the last seven days of March.

“This unprecedented increase in visits to online film piracy sites in the last week of March reveals that as more countries enforced lockdowns and required citizens to self-isolate, demand for content via piracy grew exponentially,” [Muso, a piracy tracking firm] said in a statement.

It’s not just America. Around the world, data from the last seven days of March show a massive increase in illegal downloads, compared to the month before:

Source: Muso

South Africa isn’t exempt from the trend.

According to MyBroadband, the country has seen a massive increase in Internet traffic since the national lockdown was implemented.

This increase in Internet traffic means that there is a higher demand for media across various platforms, including streaming services, social media, and – as noted by Microsoft – piracy.

The next time you click that download button, however, you might want to keep the following in mind.

Microsoft has warned users of a significant increase in malware and ransomware embedded into illegal downloads of movies and other media.

“With lockdown still in place in many parts of the world, attackers are paying attention to the increase in the use of pirate streaming services and torrent downloads,” Microsoft Security Intelligence warned on Twitter.

“We saw an active coin miner campaign that inserts a malicious VBScript into ZIP files posing as movie downloads.”

Malicious files were labelled as popular movies, so exercise caution if you’re dabbling in the downloads.

You’ll need your computer more than ever now that most of us work from home, so cramming it full of malware isn’t ideal.

Perhaps it’s best to stick to the streaming channels for now.

[sources:cnbc&mybroadband]