News Fake MSI Afterburner Infects Targets With Coin Miner, Password Stealer

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Phaaze88 said:
Should be common sense to get yo [KICK] from the official sites...
The Windows key resellers, I get why some would go to them, but Afterburner is already free...
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Not that they would infect you, but I often find Guru3D ranking first on my download pages for MSI Afterburner, with MSI's page being second. I was once trying to get my dad to install TeamViewer so I could remotely connect to his PC to try and help him, and I swear it took 30 minutes of excruciatingly painful talk on the phone to get him to do it the right way. I'm not sure what he did the first time, but he ended up at some malicious download location.

Me: "Type 'www.teamviewer.com' into your browser address bar and press enter."
Dad: "Okay."
Me: "You should see a blue screen with a black 'Download for free' button in the middle-left."
Dad: "I don't see anything like that."
...
Me: "Um, what browser are you using?"
Dad: "Windows."
Me: [Facepalm]

What's really hard is that he used to be at least somewhat competent on computers. He was one of the first computer guys back in the 60s! Worked for IBM for a while, also did AS400 consulting for 20 or so years. These days, at 87, he's very much slowing down and getting into the senile stages of life.
 
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I have ALWAYS downloaded and installed MSI Afterburner from the official Guru3D downloads section link. Never tried any other software hosting website. Makes little sense why would someone install this software tool from unknown sources.
 
I did a quick test between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, and Google lists the official site, Guru3D, and TechSpot as the top three results, DDG lists the official site and then two very sketchy sites, and Bing lists the official site, a sketchy site, and Techspot as their top three.

Just a reminder that while analytics may be something we dislike about companies, they do help protect against sketchy stuff.
 
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Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
I did a quick test between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, and Google lists the official site, Guru3D, and TechSpot as the top three results, DDG lists the official site and then two very sketchy sites, and Bing lists the official site, a sketchy site, and Techspot as their top three.

Just a reminder that while analytics may be something we dislike about companies, they do help protect against sketchy stuff.
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It's the love/hate relationship people end up having with Google. They're a huge corporation with massive control over what we see online, but so far their search results are almost universally better than DuckDuckGo and Bing, etc. It's disgusting that both of those end up pointing at the fake msiafterburner.co site.
 
Phaaze88 said:
When I search 'msi afterburner', I get this:
https://imgur.com/Fb3JroH
4th link fake.

When I search 'msi afterburner download', I get this:
https://imgur.com/O2cTrit
3rd and 7th are sus.

¯\(ツ)/¯ What am I doing wrong?
Click to expand...
No, that's correct. What I'm saying is that a reputable search engine should actively detect and ban any malware results. Google actually does that, Bing and DuckDuckGo have malware results on the first page. Anywhere on the first page rates as a fail in my book.
 
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