Don’t use Crunchyroll at the moment.

7goodangel:

Ok so not seeing much info on here about it and after just going to the website I can say that Crunchyroll, right now, is hacked. 

I usually go to the recent uploads for anime page and when I go there – it gave me a 404. I should have stopped right there but I was thinking that maybe they reorganized it or named it differently? It’s entirely possible. 

So I went to the home page…

which automatically downloaded a thing called ‘Crunchy Viewer.EXE’

….

I panicked. 

Luckily, if my schooling has taught me right, EXE files cannot do anything until you run them. And by definition, exe malware tends to be Trojan Horses. So – I automatically deleted the dang thing and ran my two antivirus items three times. Neither of them are coming back with something in the quarantine – which is good!

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SO – This means that Crunchyroll has been hacked. Cause it wasn’t a misspelling of that website – I double checked. 

I have seen people on Twitter talking about it and the German Crunchyroll page did warn it’s users to not use it at the moment. 

But when I got on here – there was nothing. So I thought to make this small PSA.

SO – what happens if you went there and the EXE file downloaded?

• DON’T. RUN. THE. PROGRAM. That’s it. As long as you delete the program from you system and do not run it – it should be all good. 

Then… what can I do now?

• Just don’t go to the website. Crunchyroll will eventually see what’s happening and get their IT staff working on restoring it back to normal.

What about the mobile app? Or the gaming console app? Or VRV?

• Well I tested VRV on my phone and it seemed like Crunchyroll was working, but I deleted both of the apps from my phone temporarily until things have been resolved. Not sure how the gaming app is. I believe if anyone tried to watch something from these places – you will get an error. 

Anything I can do to prep for something like this in the future?

• YES! On the browser you use, make sure that you have your settings for downloads to ‘Ask where you want to download’. This will make sure any drive-by downloads will have to be verified by you first before they download onto your system. That’s pretty much how you can beat a drive-by malware download. 
• Also if you go to a website often and the typical way you get there doesn’t work – then look online at other places to see if they are down or some other information. Twitter is amazingly great with this since people can quickly state what is happening when it’s going on. 

Well that’s my long bit on this! I will do a follow-up on this as well whenever Crunchyroll is able to get it figured out on their end. Not sure if any of their affiliates were hacked either so be cautious when going to related websites too. 

EDIT: Seems like someone says that the malware it downloads will encrypt your hard drive… So yeah – just in case anyone was wondering what that download would do when you run it o-o