Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
Afaik, the problem was a trojan inside the cracked windows images they used to avoid paying for windows keys. I doubt the intent was to create a botnet, it seems more like generic cybercrime.
I personally always wipe the preinstalled OS to avoid issues like this. However, make sure to use a clean image directly from the source. Simply reinstalling from within Windows wouldn't have helped in this case, because the malware was part of the recovery files.
The story originated from a video from the "The Net Guy Reviews" YouTube channel. Most articles I've seen so far oversimplify the issue and/or get facts wrong, therefore I recommend checking out the original video if you want to learn more.
Yeah malware is everywhere - This could simply be a product of an individual actor abusing their position in a supply chain.... but this also goes for hardware as well. It is certainly a more difficult vector to attack from but due to its 'level' it's a valuable position to compromise.