Beware the blizzard of torrents of Starcraft 2

Starcraft 2 was released this week and at the hefty RRP of £45. Many games sites are hopping mad at this, although typically retailers are selling Blizzard's strategy game at £10 less than RRP.

The price is of little consequence to gamers who download pirate versions of SC2 from the torrents.

But beware, says Andrew Brandt of the security company Webroot. Some SC2 torrents appear to "bring along a side dish of malware".

One, supposedly a custom game launcher, drops the Zbot keylogger Trojan, for example.

Nothing new here, but the sub-text is that the aggravation you go through cleaning up an infected PC much outweighs the cost of buying a retail copy of SC2. Few torrent users will take notice.

Despite the piracy, Blizzard will make a killing from SC2. It is expected to sell 3m copies this week and 7m by the end of the year.