Ghost peers connecting to trackerless, just-created torrent seed?

Any torrent experts out there that can give a logical explanation for this?

I created a new torrent seed, and as I was about to add a tracker, before ever saving the torrent, I got a russian peer that couldn’t connect, followed by a successful chinese connection that disconnected remotely shortly after.
This is a torrent for a file I created myself, that I never saved, and was only created seconds before the first two connection attempts.

Should I be concerned? How does this even work? What exactly happens with the handshake and information exchange for torrent connections?
My previous very limited understanding of how a torrent works would suggest this couldn’t be possible without a compromised piece of software, or a local software spoofing a russian IP address, but I don’t actually really know anything concrete about torrents besides “stuff be downloaded in chunks, yo”

1 Like

Where did you see these connections? On the interface or in the application? Maybe some DHT / peer exchange ricochet… And there are a lot of bugs in p2p applications, for a reason there are whole lists of banned applications.

PS
Describe your environment and configurations accurately.

using Manjaro linux on kernel 9.5.11-3, and Tixati 2.75. It appeared under the Peers tab with the torrent highlighted.
Outside of that, it’s all fairly vanilla.