Have you ever had malware on your PC?

[mister meaner]

Title

 

[Brazen Wanker]

Got Vundo/Virtumonde in the early 2000's . Couldn't be fixed and I had to wipe my hard drive and start over.

 

[SandyCat]

Yes and the dragon scimitar cursor was worth it

 

[Chocolate Wombat]

A few times. The worst was this ransomware that had been embedded into ads on Myspace (it was a long time ago) so that when the ad ran it somehow saved the malware to the system and then blocked most kinds of virus protection. I used my backup PC to research it and found information on the folder where it saved the malware. It didn't block File Explorer so I was able to rename the files to keep it from working and then ran Malware Bytes to remove it.

Fun times.

 

[Toolbox]

Yes it's called Intel Management Engine, it's on your PC too

What's the AMD equivalent?

 

[K-Hole]

What's the AMD equivalent?

Intel Management Engine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Intel's main competitor AMD has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs.[5]

Run your browsing through soft virtualisation like Sandboxie if you can. Even better, through hard virtualisation like Virtual Box or VMWare. Internetz is where most malware come from.

Antivirus is pretty much useless these days but slows machines down. Still some good ones if you know how to use them. Don't cost much either. Not gonna shill.

2nd and 3rd opinion scanners are good. You can get these for free. Some charge to clean shit they find (hitman pro) but some don't (Emsisoft Emergency Kit).

Legit sites can get hijacked so don't always trust everything you download. Most of my few malware attacks came from trusted sites that got installers corrupted (FLStudio/Linux Mint).

With regard to the IME, yeah, if you have a Cat 5 cable in the back of your PC, it's powering downloads even when the PC is turned off. It's below Ring 0.

Protection ring - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In x86 systems, the x86 hardware virtualization (VT-x and SVM) is referred as "ring −1", the System Management Mode is referred as "ring −2", the Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor are sometimes referred as "ring −3".[19]

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ring+%E2%88%921

So even running your browsing through soft/hard virtualisation doesn't stop you from spying, it just helps out with getting infected with malware.

The government, Microsoft, Apple, CIA, FBI, NSA, have a log on everything you have ever done over the last decade. If they haven't prosecuted you yet, it's only because they are waiting for the right moment. They don't really care about all that sick porn. Hell, they don't even care about most of that child porn, as they put most of that sick shit up there themselves to bait marks for future use.

All of your telecommunications have been recorded and stored since the late 80's anyway, way before the internet.

Malware?

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/129098/what-is-protection-ring-1

Spoiler: Malware

This piece of code is referred to as "ring -1". There is no such actual privilege level, but since it can host multiple kernels all of which believe they have ring 0 access to the system, it makes sense.


System Management Mode is another beast with special instructions. Firmware (your BIOS) sets up a SMM handler to handle System Management Interrupts - configurable depending on what the firmware wants to be notified of. When these events are triggered, the OS (or even hypervisor) is suspended and a special address space is entered. This area is supposed to be invisible to the OS itself, while executing on the same processor. Hence "ring -2", since it is more privileged than a hypervisor would be.


You'll also hear "ring -3" mentioned here and there in reference to Intel ME or AMD's PSP. This is a second processor running a separate firmware (Intel I believe uses ARC SoC processors) capable of doing anything it likes to the primary system. Ostensibly this is to provide IPMI/remote management of hardware type functionality. It can run whenever there is power to the hardware regardless of whether the main system is powered on or not - its purpose, as I say, would be to power on the main system.

 

[Ass Johnson]

Last time I had malware was in late 2001. I never got to identify what it was but holy shit it nuked every non system file it could find. Tried to open Ye Olde IE5 and was met with the "open with" dialog, which was a sure sign of everything going tits up. It was almost certainly limewire related.

 

[FATTESTCUNT]

Yep, back in the late 90s.

When I got my first PC, I knew next to nothing about Windows. I noticed a couple of toolbars get added to my browser (IE) and when I removed them, they kept adding themselves back.

Also, my PC got infected by simply receiving an email from a friend whose PC was also infected, via a security hole in Outlook Express (the email client I was using at the time). It was some kind of worm that was just designed to spread as far as it could, so it had no payload as such, other than adding a weird signature to all outgoing mail.

I bet there was other stuff that I didn't even know about. My PC was cheap (relatively), so it was fucking slow even when it was running at its best.

 

[Toolbox]

The worst kind I ever remember having was one of those that actually attempts to lock up any searches for anti-malware programs and actually blocked my ability to launch common anti malware. This was years ago, and it was actually solved by downloading an early version of malwarebytes back when they were actually competent and didn't rely on subscriptions. The program didn't recognize it and it was able to wipe it from my pc.

 

[Retink]

I've been online since Napster, though I was very young, so I've had plenty and have had to reformat drives before. Nothing recently though, but I haven't been as active in piracy.

 

[The Luigi Player]

the among us virus hack (download free)!
jokes aside, early 2010's I was stupid on my laptop and clicked on some ads w/o protection (before I knew what antiviruses were, or resetting/backing up the computer) so when I realized my laptop turned like the MEMZ virus I started to ball, and asked someone on my fucking ps3 what to do. they told me how to hard reset my pc step by step. I will still remember that moment for ps3 windows hard reset tutorial vc, thanks Buttsville6.

 

[Incorrect Password]

Bricked the family PC by trying to install free cheats for Call of duty WaW

 

[get_ur_gamon]

I remember downloading a PSP emulator which looked trustworthy. A few weeks later I came back to the website without an add block.

It was just porn ads which is never a good sign. I probably caught something there.