Did I just infect my Win-10 computer with malware?

October 5, 2022 8:26 AM

I recently bought a USB-to-HDMI adapter from Amazon. I didn't read the reviews carefully until after I plugged in the device and installed the drivers (this is a Windows 10 machine). Some of the reviews say that the drivers might be bundled with malware.

The device is listed on Amazon here. Most of the positive reviews apparently pertain to a highly rated Portuguese children's book, which the seller replaced with the USB device in order to trick buyers. I've already reported the scam to Amazon.

Several reviews on Amazon mention that the drivers might be infected with malware, but nobody actually provides any specific evidence to that effect. The instructions that came with the device say to disable your antivirus before installing (I didn't do this). Here's an example review:

Doesn’t work, forces you to download a program, and is probably malware. Currently trying to uninstall and its nearly impossible to. If you did get scammed like i did: restart your computer in safe mode (google how if you dont know). Then go to your control panel and uninstall the device. Good luck, according to another recent review the high ratings with 6 thousand reviews is probably a lie as well.

Note: The installation process didn't actually require anything to be downloaded – at least, not that I could tell. When you plug the device into a USB port, it appears on Windows as a removable drive. There is an executable installer file and some extra driver files. I ran the executable without disabling ESET (my antivirus software), and the antivirus app didn't issue any alerts during install.

The adapter sort-of worked but poorly. I've already disconnected it, but now I'm worried that I might have installed malware on my PC. I haven't tried uninstalling the drivers yet, though I'll do so shortly.

Anything else I should do now? I really would prefer not to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows, since that process is a huge pain in the butt.

posted by akk2014 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

The first thing I'd do is upload all the files to VirusTotal to see if any other anti-virus software flags it as suspicious. If you want to be super cautious, do this from a different computer.

For what it's worth, the negative reviews I found assume the possibility of malware from the request to disable antivirus software and the difficulty in uninstalling the drivers. It's not great that the instructions give that advice but it's not evidence of malicious activity either. Likewise, software that's hard to uninstall is annoying, but that doesn't make it malware.

If there was malware on the device that some antivirus software was able to detect, then I would be amazed if no purchasers had alerted others of an alert from their antivirus via reviews.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 9:12 AM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

I also read the reviews and, as a person who is familiar with infosec, that sounds more like "lazy, clumsy Windows developer" than "crafty malware vector."

It could be both, but prolly it's just a bad, low-skill dev in the factory that knocked this off from a company that actually, you know, signs its drivers properly.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:54 AM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]