Using a Mac helps

 

Last edited: Apr 8, 2022

ok so we take your word for it, thats what you want us to do...the question is about the malware and how to deal with it, not where it came from..

anyone suggest anything for Mac samona or ventura?

 

Happy new year to you all! Maybe a dying harddisk?

 

rare for a 2 week old crucial 4tb x9 pro € 800+ MB speeds a sec

 

Never had "malware" from cracked plugins. I currently don't use any cracked plugins, however, when I did I never had any issues at all. May want to upgrade your computer if possible. And, yes, malware is USUALLY from clicking on things on porn sites, sorry to say. Also, if you have antivirus...make sure it's NOT one you actually paid for. Buying antivirus software is the worst, it slows down your comp big time. I use AVG, have used it for 8 years...zero issues. Once you get over being annoyed with it asking you to "buy it"...you realize it works beautifully.

 

IF there were malware to deal with... There is none - at least none of my sources have ever contained any as everything is scanned as soon as it comes in. There is malware in the wild and one must be smart about where one treads when hunting for warez.. However it sounds like with the apple side there's way more going on than just malware to have to contend with - the OEM seems to be much more actively engaged in preventing what can or cant run on your machine just by default... I use SEP (symantec endpoint protection) on all my inet facing machines and it works VERY well. Updates from broadcom are regular and plentiful. SEP doesn't miss much and is minimal for false positives. SEP does support apple as well. might be worth a try...

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2024

apple is. malware central
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40596/mac

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255185176?sortBy=best

The question is not IF able engages in illegal snooping and also allows developers like Acustica back doors to see your screen as many upset here mentioned (which is MALWARE) or JST tones and otehrs who ask users to agree to them sharing any info about you again (MALWARE) and no one never said CRACKED software has malware but the question is about how to deal with it, we know there is always malware and use firewalls but apple is making it harder for even those developers to NOT share some backdoors., apple has bribed congress into allowing their monopoly with incentives for gov branches to access, which means spying.

but they dont care about anyone here, developers if anyone do, in my humble opinion 85% of the most used software are users who had cracks, not demos but cracks, they eventually purchased software and the plugins like soothe2, soundtoys etc that are not traced are developers who support cracks as long its not them.

 

if its an ssd it likes 50% slack space to use for reblocking as memory cells degrade. Its a pain, but whats your data worth?

 

I hear ya loud and clear, completely agree... ON the windows side it's become standard practice anymore to run NON-oem versions of the OS. That is stripped and leaned out versions of the OS provided by a third-party. Most if not all the junk in the windows OS that compromise privacy or that aren't needed but use resources can be silenced or disabled. Unsure of the apple side regarding this subject. As far as malware or virus's go the best sources of scene releases are not going to contain malware. They might contain things that throw false positives for whatever A/V one might be using but it's not going to contain anything that will actually harm the host machine. At any rate I still scan everything just to be sure... In my case, none of the machines I run for audio or video production has ever had internet access and never will. So things like firewalls, anti-virus, system updater's, or anything and every other thing that would support or use internet is completely disabled or uninstalled which frees up resources and processor cycles to deal with and focus solely on production. For software's that demand an internet connection or phoning home the scene releases prove very useful in such circumstances..

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2024

use process explorer to see what tasks are running on your computer and kill the ones using cpu time that you don't need running. If they keep respawning look into them and see what they are - you can google practically any process and find out if its needed, but beware alot of hits are bogus or you have to become a "user" to see the answer., so disregard those sorts of sites for information.

Unplug your network cable, disable your wifi ( i remove the wifi cards from my computers, but I'm paranoid) and see if you still have problems - if the cpu usage drops when our network connection is physically disabled, then you may have a problem. Be sure to close your browser as it is the biggest hog of bandwidth, if you have tabs open it may be downloading (caching) pages in the background, you don't want that it slows everything down.

use sysinternals TCPview to see what remote address your system is logging onto when you have your ethernet connected. You can sort by remote address and rightclicking will give you a whois lookup on the domain.

these are all free tools, learn how to use them. They are worth your time

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

download the entire suite

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

learn how to use a virtual machine to test suspected software, there are lots of youtube videos.
its free and images are available to run everything from dos 2.1 to Windows Eleben

a virtual machine can't infect your actual hardware, unless you do some very stupid things
like running it in the vm and then copying it into your IRL machine without actually doing some testing on it.

its all fixable and I learned by doing the wrong things many years ago.
start doing backups and keep notes on whats in the backup so you know what you lose when you jump back ten images.

also you probably don't need so many plugins so always ask yourself are the headaches worth the benefits?
is the juice worth the squeeze???

 

this post is completely delusional. what sane person would think that crackers are up to putting malware in their cracks?!?!? wouldn't that give them a bad name ? who would want to use cracked software by a group that is known to put malware in their releases? fake news are made of this.

 

I mean, I got a virus from a disk (Don't Copy That Floppy!) back in a day, but that was a game. Learning experience I guess.

Never from audio software... just get what you need, not all of it. Learn VirusTotal, ask around and learn computer security basics whatever you use.

Good luck and happy trails!

 

I've rarely had issues with audiowarez from trusted sources (plenty of false positives), but lots of appz on torrent sides contain malware etc.

After a very costly malware incident (crypto wallet drained), I decided if there's one thing worth paying for it's a Malwarebytes subscription. I'd used cracked versions in the past but the hassle and risk weren't worth it.

 

This one was like NYB/Junkie iirc. You'd have to create a boot disk on another machine and then fdisk the Master Boot Record or it would infect your windows boot floppy. But these are a good example of how Virus Authors have changed in 25 years.

The last really *good virus for Windows that I remember was SoBig! which used the rpc/dcom exploit and it allowed remote execution of arbitrary code, but in most cases it would just keep bluescreening the machines over and over as fast as they could be rebooted.

They rarely make actual virus style malware anymore, where the main purpose is to infect everything they can; by sending emails or spreading to other lan machines via open network shares and accessible files of whatever type. There is no money in that. A virus like that is "loud", compared with things they create now generally, which are stealthy spyware, or they are cryptolockers aka crypters.

This stuff was never added by releasers on purpose. Files would get infected and people would send them out without knowing there was a problem with the files. The main purpose of those malware were to spread itself. Now they want to make money.

 

Malware? What's malware? I use Debian Linux... even malware developers avoid it.

 

using windows in 2024 is like using fruity loops 1.0 when you could be using bitwig

 

Never had any malware. Only use VSTs from R2R and V.R.

 

you left out "on acid"...

 

I was swimming in the ocean off of Maui while tripping on local 'shooms when a tiny little crab bit my tiny little toe. My first thought was...MALWARE!

 

OS/software/platform/brand/whatever tribalism and elitism is for complete and utter wankers. That is all.