The official launch of the Windows 7 Release Candidate last May 5 was soon followed by another version of the software, only that this other version came with a malware surprise.

A file being hosted in popular torrent sites posing as a copy of the Windows 7 RC was found to be a Trojan by security researchers. The file which arrives with the file name setup.exe is detected as TROJ_DROPPER.SPX. TROJ_DROPPER.SPX drops TROJ_AGENT.NICE. Both files are detected by the Smart Protection Network.

Windows 7 Release Candidate was leaked a couple of weeks prior to the official release, and was also hosted by and downloaded from popular torrent sites. This was followed by a reported downtime in the download page for the Windows 7 Beta, which was attributed to too many download requests.

With Windows 7 showing much promise as early as now, it isn’t really surprising that cybercriminals are using the operating system to distribute malware not necessarily as a platform, but as a social engineering technique.

Those interested in obtaining a copy of the release candidate are advised to get it from the Microsoft Windows 7 website.