As the title suggest, I may have installed some malicious software called Adventurous Clotth Tool from a company called Adventurous Cloth LLC.
For context, I was looking to download Driver San Francisco and because it’s no longer available for purchase anywhere my brother recommended SteamUnlocked, which he has used before. After skimming the comments I assumed it was safe, downloaded the file(big warning sign in retrospect) and installed the program, after mentioning this to my brother he told me that it should have been the game files in a zip folder, and obviously I broke down in a cold sweat.
I have run multiple checks using Malware Bytes, Windows Defender and an offline Windows Defender scan, all of which reported no problems, however obviously I’m still scared/nervous about what I have done.
Apart from don’t be an idiot, can anyone give me some advice on what I should be doing next? I tried searching for the company and program in question, but no results have come up.
It all depends on what kind of malware did you download. If I were you, I’d make a back-up of important files ASAP in case it’s some kind of an encryptor, put 2FA on my online accounts where possible and additionally change passwords where 2FA is not an option. You can also monitor traffic from time to time to see if your computer connects to some shady servers, but you most likely won’t notice anything wrong and that’s OK. Oh and remember to have another USB around with your OS installer so in case things go bad after some time you would be quickly able to set things up and running
There is a report in any.run, it appears to be advertising related or better said data mining.
So does that change anything, or should I still just format my pc?
Do you need windows? Go download Linux Mint and install it on your PC so you can dual-boot windows OR linux Mint. It’ll protect you against dumb stuff like this
I’m all for more Linux users but that is an extreme solution to suspected malware on Windows. I do agree that dual booting is more resilient than just Windows.
Lol for people with malware issues, it’s usually not the first or last time they’ll find a way to break something. Given how much is done on the cloud these days and how much is available for Linux, that’s usually my go to advice to prevent further issues.
Still format it, some of these malwares are hard to get rid of. Even if you don’t have malware you should reinstall windows every couple of years.