I realize how easy an infostealer can happen and I wonder if there are steps anyone takes to identify if a release is fine?

I've been fine for 10-15 years, but after seeing quite a bit of occurrences lately about infostealers, mainly in gaming packs, I've been starting to wonder. Is there reason to still worry when downloading in our community and RU? I tend to see comments and business as usual on these releases, but still. I know it's always gonna be a gamble, but has it happened to you just though downloading from these two places? I start to think about how crazy it is disabling my Windows protection and raw doggin

 

Imagine the worst-case scenario: you turn on your PC and it’s frozen—you’re infected. In the worst case, you don’t even realize it, and you become part of a botnet or your identity gets stolen. You’ll find yourself thinking, "If only I had made a backup." Make sure you have a top-notch, full backup of your C: drive, and save important programs and data to an external storage device.

 

For those gaming downloads I would use an antivirus that is easy to disable.
Be aware of possible false positives, check the source if they have comments. The most popular the download site the most comments there'll be and more chances of users finding troubles...

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2026 at 9:11 PM

just make sure you wont back up the malware so it can hunt you forever ...seriously, hacking lately has become more powerful with the arrive of "ai" ...and it can only become worse, you are okay only with an offline pc and sandbox for browsing internet, thats all

 

"Sandbox" can be a virtual machine too.
You disable IP stack on your host (real) machine.
So no one can reach your computer from your NAT home network.

And use a light virtual machine (linux) for browsing and such.

Until someone hack Linux disto AND virtual machine software at the same time, you are safe.
On my side,even being a paranoiac doomer ... i simply don't care and just take basic security mesures.

 

I've been got. I downloaded an app from a random site. I should have known better, but I was just being casual about it. About twenty minutes or so in, I noticed my PC was acting up. I had about 4TB of data on a couple of disks and I'd say within twenty minutes, 75% of it was encrypted. I'd been got by randomware.

Fortunately, I had my C: drive and my important data backed up to an external hard drive, so I didn't lose anything important. Or I did, but I was able to roll it back. Most of what I lost was just warez that I could re-download.

This was probably 8 or 9 years ago. I still don't run any antimalware software. I've tried running virtual machines but it's a pain in the ass. If there's something I really, really want and it's never been tested I might fire one up, but I generally don't bother.

I don't download from random websites any more. I stick to those places with a community keeping an eye on what gets uploaded. That's worked well for me for many, many years now. And I keep a good offline back-up of critical data.