Microsoft's brands are routinely used to defraud people, with tech support scams, phishing, and counterfeit install media all being rampant. iTS describes MarkMonitor as an 'anti-piracy company.' That's true in a sense-the company helps brands stop things like the sale of counterfeits, domain squatting, and fraud-but it seems that Microsoft's involvement with MarkMonitor is of a kind that even dedicated pirates shouldn't find too offensive. This particularly alarms iTS because of an existing Microsoft partnership with a company called MarkMonitor. Microsoft reserves the right to share some data collected by Windows 10 with certain third parties. But sending the contents of disks to Microsoft? There are no signs that Windows 10 does anything of the sort. Windows 10, like every modern mainstream operating system, does connect to numerous cloud services, and there are certainly privacy implications to these. To the best of our knowledge, this is nonsense. The reason? 'Amongst other things Windows 10 sends the contents of your local disks directly to one of their servers.' The latest fallout is something that Microsoft probably won't be too upset about: some private BitTorrent trackers that trade entirely in pirated media appear to have banned the use of Microsoft's operating system.Īccording to a post on Reddit, the iTS tracker has banned the use of Windows 10. There are multiple security vendors which provide physical or virtual firewall appliances that can perform an application-layer inspection as well as bandwidth-limiting to applications.Fears surrounding Windows 10's online connectivity and data collection are continuing to run rampant. Implementing firewall rules and Quality of Service rate limits can also curb users that are engaging in torrenting activity. This will prevent end users from browsing these sites and initiating torrent downloads from them. You can easily do this by blocking the P2P & Illegal category in your site policy.

Use QoS to throttle bandwidth-hogging endpointsĭNSFilter can effectively implement the first solution in this list - preventing access to sites that are known to distribute.

Implement a Layer-7 firewall that can perform deep packet inspection.

Prevent access to tracker sites that distribute.

There are, however, a few measures that can greatly reduce the activity and impact of torrenting: With the advent of WebRTC, torrent traffic can even take place over HTTP. Torrenting applications are not limited to a single port or protocol, so basic firewall rules cannot effectively stop it.

However, torrent traffic is almost impossible to block, given the nature of its operation. Many businesses and organizations desire to block Torrents because of the substantial amount of bandwidth this type of traffic consumes as well as its use in many cases to download illegal or explicit content.

Italian torrent trackers