Adverts for Windows drivers

A Lot Of The Sites I View Have These And They Add

"Microsoft Reccomended", WTF...



Cheers Glen.

 

Device drivers run at the nessecary level to perform their function, which is of course, direct interaction with both hardware and the operating system. This is among the highest level of permission. Effectively a rouge driver could install a seperate hypervisor on your operating system, not only with complete control of your system, but also leaving your operating system dumb to it's presence.

Disastrous. Fortunatly most of it does not have valid keys to sign these drivers so it's just running in userspace. It's certainly maleare.

 

If you are seeing advertisements for drivers ignore them, it's going to get you in trouble. Device drivers directly communicate with your hardware and the only good ones to use come directly from the hardware manufacturer. Microsoft's drivers are very generic and won't give the level of performance that the manufacturers drivers will.

There are a few rare instances where a 3rd party creates a driver that exceeds the manufacturers own, typically these would be for specific uses of a small sub-set of a manufacturer's hardware. Like KX drivers for some Creative sound cards... This was an old project though, and was targeted at using a consumer level card for professional or semi professional music recording.


Whatever you do, if you see an ad for "Free driver updates..." or some kind of "Driver update utility" don't even click the link. It's gonna be malware.

 

they are 99% of the time virus injectors.
every time you go to a site and a pop-up appears telling you need to download a codec, update drivers, etc. it is malware.

 

Why do you use Ask? ... it always leads to malware sites first with real sites listed last.

 

this is exactly it.. it's surprising how many people fall for this. sometimes it will even say you have a virus and offer to fix it, which ironically installs the virus hehe

NEVER [ever] randomly download some shit like that .. if it aint broke don't fix it, especially from some website that is obviously just guessing or really has no clue about your system.

i suspect that sites display this crap when they see "Microsoft" in your browsers useragent string. you can change this in firefox in the about:config page and making a new preference of type "string" named general.useragent.override. i set the value of mine to "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032620 Firefox/3.0b5" which looks like i'm runnin SunOS (now known as solaris) on a Sun4u workstation. I'm really running Kubuntu Linux and don't see much practical use it serves for a site to know what operating system i'm running except OS version specific attacks. Changing the type of browser in the string might cause weird behavior, and i'm sure you could make it also appear that your pc is a smartphone and vice versa but i'm sure that would lead to strange behavior as well.