Torrenting allows you to enjoy movies, e-books, and software you can’t afford. However, ISPs, movie studios, and governments don’t think that way. On top of that, downloading the wrong files exposes you to a variety of cyber threats.
That’s why you should download or upload torrents with your privacy and safety in mind. But, what can you do to ensure you torrent safely and privately?
How Can You Torrent Safely?
You can do a few things to use torrents more safely, such as using a VPN or proxy. Here we’ll be focusing on proxies as they are better than VPNs when it comes to torrenting. However, not every proxy is good for torrenting, but we’ll come to that later.
Let’s start by explaining the most common dangers of torrenting before telling you how proxies can protect you from them.
Common Dangers of Torrenting
A lot of things can go wrong when you use torrents, especially when downloading them. Some of the most common risks associated with torrenting include:
- Copyright trolls
Copyright trolls can be both annoying and dangerous. They can easily find your IP address in the torrent swarm and send it to copyright agencies and lawyers. Or, they can use it to track down your Internet Service Provider and send threatening messages.
A lot of them are scammers that will make you pay them a certain amount of money to avoid being sued for a higher amount.
- Port scanning
Torrent swarms are loaded with hackers who have your IP address at their disposal. They can use it to scan the open ports of your network and detect security vulnerabilities they can abuse to take over your device or network.
- Malware
You can never be sure if the torrent you download is safe or malicious as plenty of them are uploaded by cybercriminals. Downloading a malicious torrent and using the files will expose your device to different types of malware attacks, such as ransomware, crypto miners, adware, or spyware.
- Bandwidth throttling
Although this is not dangerous, it’s definitely frustrating. If your Internet Service Provider finds out you’re torrenting, they may throttle it which will result in slow speeds. And this is not something you want when downloading or uploading torrents.
Your ISP may even terminate your account if torrenting is against their terms of use.
How Can Proxies Help You Torrent Safely
Proxies can help you hide your identity online by providing you with a different IP address. This way, the peers in the torrent swarm you participate in will only see your proxy’s IP address. So, tracking your torrenting behavior back to you will be next to impossible.
This can be really helpful as torrent swarms, especially in public trackers can be loaded with copyright trolls or hackers. So, a proxy won’t let them see your real IP address and identify your location, ISP, or device.
The only way your genuine IP address can be linked to your proxy’s IP address is through traffic logs. When using a quality proxy, you can rest assured those data logs won’t get in the wrong hands because trustworthy proxy providers don’t keep them in the first place.
Along with hiding your IP address, a good proxy can help you enjoy faster torrent transfer. Unlike VPNs, proxies don’t encrypt traffic which makes them faster. This might help if you want to test their speed before using them.
What Is the Best Proxy for Torrenting?
The best proxies for torrenting are unlimited data residential proxies because of their undetectable nature. They ensure your IP address stays anonymous at all times so no one can see or abuse it in any way.
When it comes to the type of proxies based on protocol, SOCKS5 proxies are the way to go. Just make sure your residential proxies are private, which means no one else is using them but you. Although private residential proxies are a little bit expensive, they provide high anonymity, security, and speed making them perfect for torrenting.
Avoid free or public proxies no matter how tempting it is to save money. They neither guarantee anonymity nor security because no one owns them.
To Sum Up
Torrenting is an easy way of downloading files for free, you just need to do it safely. Using residential proxies will keep the dangers of torrenting away from you. By hiding your IP address, they will keep you hidden from copyright trolls and hackers.
