qBittorrent official forums

Hi all,

When I started my Windows, the following message popped up and the file name was "warning_Qbittorrent.txt".

Message begins here----------------------------------
Security advice: Protect your identity when downloading torrents!

Your real identity and ip address is visible while downloading torrents. BitTorrent isn't the safe haven it once was. These days, everyone's looking to throttle your connection, spy on what you're downloading, or even send you an ominous letter. If you use BitTorrent, you absolutely need to take precautions to hide your identity. An easy and reliable solution is a VPN by hide.me. hide.me doesn't store any logs and offers blazing fast connections.

hide.me VPN is trusted by more than 500.000 internet users worldwide and recommended by KickassTorrents and Torrentfreak.
Message ends here------------------------------------

Is this a spam, or a real message from Qbittorrent? Should I use hide.me?
Or should I do something else to protect my privacy?

Thank you,

[quote="caribou"]Is this a spam, or a real message from Qbittorrent? Should I use hide.me? [/quote]

This is definitely a result of a 3rd party action. qBittorrent would never do this. Are you sure you have downloaded the official installer from OUR download page?
If yes, then you probably have a "bad actor" program on your system. Something like a trojan or other malware.

We don't have any affiliation with hide.me . But I personally would NEVER use a service that used these suspicious ways to reach me.(ie leaving spam via malware).

Thank you, sledgehammer, for your quick reply.

Yes, I downloaded the official installer. But I will check my PC for any viruses.

Thank you again!

Definitly not something that qBittorrent does, someting else is making that text file.

Run these:

https://www.malwarebytes.org/

http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro

And then use a proper antivirus.
Avast; Avira. (both free)

You can also use Norton's DNS that keeps you guarded: https://dns.norton.com/
(It's like Google's DNS or OpenDNS, except this one also protects you.)

I just saw this message from Kickass torrents, one of their "sponsored links" so it may have been some ignorant clicking going on installed something you didn't want from a site that is less than desirable in the first place, especially if you're not careful.
It just was text in the browser not a popup or a txt file as you describe though, I have peerblocker that might have luckily blocked the bulk of the attempt if there was any.