It was a matter of time until this was implemented. And they took advantage of a recently updated software that made a big bang when it was released as it didn't get an update for a year.
says there that the ransomware made its way through torrents. now I don't use mac but I regularly download files from torrents. are my files in danger too? what do I do to prevent it?
This is not being distributed via torrents. It is being transmitted via the install file from Transmission, which is a torrent client. You can protect yourself using essentially common sense and some kind of anti virus software to help