On the first article: Firstly it has nothing to do with qBittorrent itself exploiting your device, its attackers exploiting qBittorrent.

A combination of unchanged default credentials

Yes if you don’t change the default password and configure your router to allow qBittorrent to open ports hackers can get in, this isn’t a security vulnerability it’s a user error.

Oh and I just read your bottom paragraph, yeah qBittorrent isn’t related to any large company. It’s generally trusted as a very good client by much of the community.

Second/third article: I am aware of these risks. None of this seems to contradict any of my claims or what I already know.

Hmm that’s weird. Then how did the German government know I downloaded 2 specific movies when I visited Germany and forgot to shut down my torrent client when I got onto the hotel wifi? I got a letter with the names of the movies, date and time and a hefty fine.

It looks like Germany really cracks down on piracy. Although I can see that with dns requests could provide a way for people to find what your torrenting (which by default the ISP has full view of [dns requets] [but you can use dns over https and a different dns provider to help that]). Just a tip in general qBittorrent has a feature to bind your torrent connection to the VPN so that you it can’t connect to the internet aside from through the VPN. I’m not sure about deluge but it probably has something, it’s a really important feature to enable.

Although it looks like they still need to access the torrent swarm in order to properly frame you. So using private trackers should provide better protection against those risks. I usually use a VPN although I have gone naked in private trackers on rare occasions and it hasn’t been an issue yet… although copyright trolls in pt’s are pretty rare afaik and trolls get reported, triangulated and banned pretty quickly (afaik).

I’ve been downloading for 30 years, of which most years were with torrents.

My apologies, I made an assumption.