If it’s unwanted, disruptive, and (allegedly) impacts performance, that’s not “malware-like”. It’s malware.
Hey Nocture you didn’t respond to my private message so I’m asking publicly, when you reported me to myself here, what did you expect me to do about it? Ban myself? And what rule did I break? My instance (yes, I’m the owner) doesn’t require AskLemmy to have open-ended question format. In fact, the sidebar explicitly states this. Not sure what your expectation was.
Next time it would be polite to answer the private message. Happy holidays.
I did not reply because it was obvious I made a mistake (as a partially blind person does when reading small text.) And you took a widely accepted community name and format and gave it your own twist, then sent a PM that was obviously looking for drama. Which is further obvious here.
I think the title indicates that it’s like the malware known as “Christmas.exe”.
Edit: I have too much faith in humanity…
From the article:
Even worse, the malware-looking Christmas wreath is linked to a process called “Christmas.exe.”
So the process was actually called that. It popped up on my machine this morning and I immediately started scanning the whole system for malware and searching to see if anyone else had this problem.
It also automatically reinstalls itself through a BIOS feature. That’s advanced level malware.
I’d love to know if this was just some guy who went ‘let’s ship it to all our customers!’ or if this was a C-level 300 hours of meetings type of thing which concluded that spreading christmas malware cheer was the right move.
this was downloaded and ‘installed’ by asus armory crate, which came from malware baked right into the bios of new and ‘newish’ asus motherboards (how to disable)
Remember when Lenovo did this?
Who green lit this? I really hope that person gets fired immediately.
The lack of any visual link to ASUS isn’t even the biggest problem for me; it’s that ASUS rolls out a program that (presumably) puts itself in autostart by default and just pops up without prompt at all.
Edit: There’s a fucking setting in the BIOS to auto-install ASUS’ bullshit software? And it’s enabled by default… jesus fucking christ
Most computers firmware can store a Windows executable. Microsoft pushed for an addition to the ACPI tables called WPBT. That stores a Windows exectuable in the firmware. It is of course totally used for the intended purpose…
I’m always dismayed but not surprised by how many people don’t know about Windows Platform Binary Table, which has existed since Windows 8. It’s not exactly the type of feature that Microsoft or the board vendors would want to publicize, seeing as it gives them persistent rootkit capabilities on the same level as UEFI rootkits.
Most normal people’s model of Windows security is “if something goes wrong then I wipe the disk and reinstall Windows,” and WPBT completely breaks that model, and has been doing so for 12 years.
Thankfully there are ways to disable it:
Curious, what do you run? Gigabyte is still meh, ASRock I’ve heard is questionable, MSI is blacklisted garbage for me after a failed bios update and failed flashback restore…
I’ve only heard good things about Aorus (which is basically Gigabyte), though
There has been for years now. Disabling it is part of my first-time setup for a new board.
Why don’t every vendor with an installed app make a similar banner?
It would be so festive, and I bet people would love it, to have 20 or 30 such occurrences every time you need to use your computer during holidays.
It would of course be optimal if each has an animation and a tune, that need to finish before you can escape.
Weird that only Asus had this brilliant idea? It’s so awesome when you are not in control of what happens on your computer.
/s
If you want to take back control, Linux is your best option.
Oooh, make one of them a little purple animated gorilla, I’d like that too.
Thank god I was using Linux
LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX
GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux GNU/Linux…
