how to download torrent securely How To Download Torrents Anonymously, Safely & Securely. Downloading a file via a is one of the most popular ways to get files online. However, it is not always the safest method. If you get your files via torrent, there is always a chance that the files are corrupted and malicious. On the other hand, you may also get into legal trouble. A lot of torrented files are illegal to download. Also, hackers and intruders can track your IP address. Because of all the risks of publicly downloading torrents, it is best to hide your IP as much as possible. The best way to do this is to use a (VPN). This article will explain how to download torrents anonymously so that nobody can track you. Attention All Streamers : Here's a few facts for you about the potential dangers of streaming online while unprotected: Your ISP has a direct window into everything you view and stream on the web Your ISP is now LEGALLY allowed to sell that information about what you view Most ISPs don't want to deal with lawsuits directly, so oftentimes they will pass along your viewing information to protect themselves, further compromising your privacy. The only way to protect your viewing and identity in the 3 above scenarios is by using a VPN. By streaming content directly through your ISP, you potentially expose everything you view on the to both them, as well as those who's interest they might be protecting. A VPN protects that. Follow these 2 links and you'll be streaming securely in no time: is our VPN of choice. They are extremely fast and their security is top notch. Get 3 months free for a limited time Learn How To Install a VPN on Your Fire TV Stick. How Can Others Track Me? When you’re using a BitTorrent client, you are sharing files through a peer-to-peer network. This means that your (IP) address and metadata are visible to other network users. Exposing your IP address makes you easily trackable. You may unknowingly engage in illegal activity and your government will know right away. But you can hide your IP address by using a VPN. What Is a VPN? Using the right VPN means that you create another IP address in place of your real one. Your real address and location are encrypted, and you are not exposing yourself. VPN also uses 265-bit , which protects your information from hackers. Choosing a Good VPN. Not all VPNs are good for torrenting. Some VPNs have features that will completely hide you while you use your BitTorrent client. However, there are VPNs that are openly against torrenting activities. For example, Hoxx VPN sanctions torrenting. Some VPNs allow torrenting but don’t do a good job when trying to hide your identity. If you use an unreliable VPN, you risk exposing yourself. Some of the essential factors for a good VPN are: Rules : you want a VPN that allows torrenting. Location : the VPN should be located outside of “Fourteen Eyes” countries – these are countries that belong to international surveillance alliances. They include the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, and some more European countries. Logging rule s: the best VPNs are the ones that don’t gather logs and data. Speed : the faster, the better. Best VPN for Torrenting. Some of the best VPN services for torrenting safely are: This VPN ticks all the boxes of a good VPN. It allows torrenting, encrypts data and doesn’t gather any logs. Its monthly subscription is $2.75. : A quick and reliable VPN that secures your data and downloads torrents quickly. It offers military-grade encryption, so nobody can find your location. It costs $3 a month. : A VPN with a good reputation that is successful for over ten years. No user ever encountered a problem with this service. You can subscribe for a monthly fee of $1.9 : This VPN is the most expensive on this list, at $6.67 a month. However, it offers the best service, as it is located offshore, doesn’t record logs, and locks your traffic if there is a chance your IP may leak. You can also use this VPN on any device. Are there Alternatives to VPN Services? If you don’t want to use a VPN, you may consider other alternatives. They can’t replace all the features of a VPN, but they will keep you anonymous. Free Proxy Service. Proxy services like Hide My Ass hide your real IP address and let you download torrents somewhat safely. On the downside, they don’t have 256-bit encryption, so they leave you vulnerable to hacking and data leaking. Because it lacks strong encryption and comes with a lot of security concerns, it’s usually better not to risk using only a proxy service. Anomos. This is a peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent. It uses an extra layer of encryption that makes its users more secure. A notable negative feature is that this software doesn’t use normal torrent files but has its own ‘atorrent’ files instead. Torrent Privacy and BTGuard. These two programs are alternatives to BitTorrent clients. They are pay-to-use, and they make you completely anonymous while downloading. BTguard is compatible with all devices and operating systems, while Torrent Privacy is only available for Windows. Conclusion. If you frequently use a BitTorrent client, it is best to stay safe. When you expose your IP, you risk terrible consequences. You may engage in illegal activities without knowing it, and you are prone to cyber-attacks and data theft. By using a VPN or some of the alternatives, you can stay safe and avoid big problems down the line. How to Torrent Safely and Legally. Torrenting is usually associated with copyright infringement. Online pirates use torrents to illegally download movies, video games, music, software, and much more. Even before Netflix banned the use of VPNs to watch movies and TV shows, many resorted to torrents to pirate video. But as authorities crack down on torrent trackers and users, demand for free alternatives has risen. The underlying BitTorrent technology is not illegal. In fact, many perfectly legal reasons to torrent exist, and the internet holds quite a few bastions for legal downloaders to find movies in the public domain, freeware, and indie video games, to name a few. Dozens of websites are dedicated to legal torrent downloads. Some are limited in scope, while others have a bit of everything. We’ll start with some recommendations for the latter. General Content Sites. Archive.org. The Internet Archive is a non-profit online library of books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It contains millions of files, most of which can now be torrented. The content is either part of the public domain, user-generated by the community, or licensed under creative commons. The books and audio sections really stand out here, as they include audiobooks. You can also find some cool oddball sections for things like old- time radio programs and microfilm. Legit Torrents. Legit Torrents states, “Our goal is to be the biggest and best legal torrent tracker.” Users can search torrents and filter by category and status (i.e. if there are peers seeding the file on the network or not). The tracker aggregates everything, but it’s especially good for software. If you know exactly what you’re looking for, Legit Torrents is a great option. The results return few duplicates, which makes finding files much less of a hassle. It lacks any sort of browsing or trending options, so go with keywords in hand. TV and Movies. Public Domain Torrents. Fans of classic TV shows and movies will drool over Public Domain Torrents. The site focuses on films old enough to be in the public domain (usually 50+ years old) as well as B-movies. It currently boasts just under 1,000 films. The site doesn’t look like much, but it’s fun to browse through the lists of films categorized by genre. The site unfortunately lacks a search function, but you can easily click the “SHOW ALL” link and find what you want by using Ctrl+F. Vodo. Connoisseurs of independent films and TV series will find a lot to love in Vodo, a site that brings together creators from all over the world to distribute their content. Users can either download videos via torrent or stream them for free. A few books and games are also available, but the focus is really on video. Vodo periodically releases special event bundles, which are time-limited, curated, and themed packs of content. To take full advantage of the site, registration is required. Music. Panda.cd. Panda.cd is a torrent tracker featuring free music with a Creative Commons and/or artist permission. Registration is required. Tracks are tagged by genre, and previews are available before downloading. Musicians are free to upload their own music to Panda.cd and distribute it through the site. Etree. Etree primarily features live concert recordings of free trade musicians. It’s great if you want to hear what a local band sounds like in person before buying tickets to the show, especially if they aren’t big enough to be on Spotify or iTunes yet. One nice touch is that you can choose to hide Grateful Dead and Phish recordings from search results, which there are a lot of. A lot. Games. GameUpdates.org. GameUpdates aggregates patches, mods, and updates for thousands of video games. Whenever you purchase a game, you’re entitled to have the most updated version (DLCs notwithstanding). However, finding official patches can be a pain, especially for older games. Others have unofficial patches and mods to improve games that haven’t been sanctioned by the developer but are 100% legal. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any dedicated torrent sites for full games that are still being maintained. Let us know in the comments if you know of one! Software. LinuxTracker. If you’re looking to download a free operating system, LinuxTracker is the place to do it. Operating systems, as you might have guessed, are made up of huge files. That makes them ideal to download via BitTorrent. LinuxTracker lists almost every version of every Linux distro you want for both personal computers and servers. OpenOffice. Want to be able to view and edit Microsoft Office files from programs like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint but don’t want to shell out the cash for an official license? OpenOffice allows you to do just that without uploading and converting files to Google Drive, and it’s absolutely free. OpenOffice applications don’t have all the bells and whistles of MS Office, but they get the job done for the occasional user. The software can be downloaded via torrent straight from the official website. Burnbit. Burnbit isn’t a website to search for torrents. Instead, it’s a site to create torrents from . If you have a download link for something you would rather torrent than download in your browser, Burnbit allows you to do so. It locates all the “mirror” websites that host the desired file and turns them into “webseeds” while also finding any seeders on the BitTorrent network. Burnbit is a handy tool for large file downloads like video games, software, and HD video. Unlike browser-based downloads, torrents don’t have to be restarted from scratch if your computer falls asleep or gets disconnected during a long download. Precautions. Even if your torrenting activities are legal, they might not appear that way to your internet service provider. An ISP might just see peer-to-peer torrent traffic and simply assume you’re doing something illegal. Their reaction could be anything from an angry email to throttling your P2P network bandwidth. The BitTorrent protocol also exposes your IP address to other users on the network, which can lead to privacy issues. For these reasons, we still recommend legal torrenters use a VPN service. A VPN encrypts all of your internet traffic before it leaves the device, then routes it through a in a location of your choosing. This effectively hides the content and destination of your network traffic, masks your IP, and should prevent an ISP from throttling traffic. Courtesy. Torrents, whether legal or illegal, are made possible by people who contribute some of their computer resources to seed files that others download. As a general rule, it’s common courtesy to seed as much as you leech. This is called the “1:1 rule”, and it helps keep the ecosystem of torrents going. Seeding is especially important for legal torrents, which often don’t have as many seeders as popular copyrighted material. Please do your best to seed 1:1 and possibly more, if you can. About the Author: Paul Bischoff is a Privacy Advocate for Comparitech.com where he provides advice on how to stay safe, secure and private online. Paul was previously the China editor for Tech in Asia and a regular contributor to Mashable . Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this guest author article are solely those of the contributor, and do not necessarily reflect those of Tripwire, Inc. How To Securely Torrent Over VPN? In a nutshell, you will need to do the following in order to download torrent(s) over VPN securely. Activate hide.me Stealth Guard Enable Kill Switch Bind torrent client into VPN via SOCKS proxy Enable UPnP (Optional) Note: hide.me isn’t blocking or throttling any type of traffic. All of our servers are torrent-friendly. Step 1: Activate hide.me Stealth Guard. Stealth Guard is a feature that limits connectivity while the VPN connection is not active. This way you can ensure that; a) You don’t consume unwanted data traffic if your data package is limited. b) Apps do not leak your real IP address. You can enable this feature in a restrictive way for all apps or in a less restrictive way for selected apps only. It is extremely useful if you want to ensure that your apps are never able to communicate without an active VPN. We recommend you to enable hide.me Stealth Guard for an additional layer of security. To do so, click on Settings (cog wheel) icon at the top right of our app. Click on the Stealth Guard tab on the left side followed by Limit Apps to VPN. If you want your app(s) to not have an Internet connection when the VPN is disabled, click on + to add an app. Step 2: Enable Kill Switch Options. Kill Switch ensures that your IP address does not leak in case the VPN connection drops. On a technical level, it binds all connectivity to the connected VPN server. By default, these options are enabled and if you would like to check, please go to the Settings menu again, choose Kill Switch tab on the left. Now, please ensure both Kill Switch and Limit Connection to VPN buttons are set to enabled. Please note the Limit connection to VPN option deletes the default Internet route on the successful VPN connection and restores it after successful disconnection from the VPN only. This is to ensure the VPN will be connected properly and there is no IP leak issue. Step 3: Set up SOCKS proxy. We would also suggest that you bind your torrent client to our VPN using SOCKS proxy. For more information about this, please click here. Step 4: Enable UPnP (Optional) UPnP is useful to open ports on the VPN server, which allows direct connections between peers, so for filesharing applications can directly leech content from seeders without relying on centralised servers which results in faster download speeds. To enable this option, please click here and follow the instructions. If you have any other concerns that need addressing, contact our Support team directly. Anonymous VPN & Proxy Blog. Who can you trust for Torrent VPN service? Most VPN providers have a disclaimer or clause in their TOS which excludes the use of their vpn services for torrents. At TorGuard, we allow torrents on all of our VPN service packages for no extra charge . The traditional measures taken to torrent anonymously aren’t quite enough to keep you safe. It is becoming increasingly easier for prying eyes to view torrent download traffic. You don’t even need to be doing anything illegal, either. Maybe you just want to keep “big brother” out of your personal business or simply prevent bandwidth throttling. Either way, if you’re really serious about keeping your download activity private, your best option is to securely tunnel your torrent traffic through an anonymous Torrent VPN or Proxy server. Here we’ll go over the top four ways to say safe when downloading torrents: 1.) Download torrents through a VPN or Proxy service! Your personal IP is like your online fingerprint and is completely naked for the online world to see when you download torrents. It’s now more important than every before to download torrents anonymously through a VPN or Proxy service like TorGuard. This effectively hides your IP, keeping your personal info private when downloading torrent files. 2.) Download only torrent files from services that you trust. Although you can still get a virus from any torrent website, using sites that are trusted and heavily commented will cut down on these chances. Always read user comments to make sure the torrent isn’t fake or even embedded with or trojans. 3.) Scan all torrent downloads with Anti Virus software. Most people have AV software already installed that will scan all their new downloads in the background. This is a step you don’t want to skip, because once you accidentally click a virus, it’s already too late. They already have your IP address and possible remote access to control your system. Remember, use a VPN or Proxy service provider AND a FREE antivirus utility. 4.) Delete your torrent downloads from any folders that you don’t want others to have access to. For example, don’t store your private torrent downloads in a publicly shared folder or in a folder that has local network sharing options. This is somewhat a no brainer. Don’t risk your future, stay anonymous on bittorrent with TorGuard! Error establishing a database connection. 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