The summary before you panic: If you have recently downloaded a new version of MSI Afterburner, it is recommended that you scan your PC for viruses and malware. However, if you downloaded it from a trusted repository or installed it on your PC a long time ago, you should have nothing to worry about.
Be careful where you download MSI Afterburner
This story comes from the CRIL (Cyble Intelligence and Research Lab), which realized that there are several active campaigns of Phishing who use the well-known MSI Afterburner software to install an XMR (Monero) miner on users’ PCs, taking advantage of the fact that the protocol of this cryptocurrency allows transactions to be obfuscated. Also, it seems that the miner does not activate until the CPU has been idle for at least 60 minutes, so they make sure that the user does not notice the slow performance of the PC.
In other words, these fraudulent versions install a miner that takes advantage of your hardware to mine, but also, according to the published report, to steal information. It was discovered on more than 50 malicious websites.
MSI Afterburner is a software designed to be able to overclock the graphics card, as well as to monitor its parameters and, in conjunction with Rivatuner, even to create an overlay in games that allows you to see the FPS, temperatures, etc. For this reason, it is one of the most popular software that a large number of users have installed on their PC.
However, this high popularity has served cybercriminals as a way to spread their malware, and this is not the first time this has happened. Moreover, this time it is quite serious since, according to the source, this campaign includes not only download links to fake software on some web pages, but also download links in emails and even advertising in all kinds of media.
The domains used by these fraudulent web pages often include the name of MSIand they are of the type msi-afterburner-download.site for example, which is not too difficult to “cut” if the user is not too attentive.
Where to download the software with guarantees?
This is not the first time that MSI has had to come forward to warn users, since something very similar has happened in the past, and also with its Afterburner tool. Without going any further, last year the company warned in a statement to be careful of fake web pages that aim to trick users into impersonating the company.
For this reason, if you intend to download MSI Afterburner in the near future to install it on your PC (or to update the version you currently have), we recommend that you be particularly careful and only do so from its official site, making sure the domain is msi.com and no other. And, if you have installed it recently, as we told you at the beginning, the recommendation is to scan your PC for possible viruses and malware, lest you have made a mistake and you downloaded it from one of these scam sites.