Article from “Tom’s Hardware”:
- Microsoft warns GPU mining malware is being spread to users through SEO poisoning and AI chatbots
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…to lure users into downloading GPU mining malware disguised as popular PC utilities.
That eliminates about 99% of us here in the Linux community because we know better! 
But this is pretty wild, thanks for sharing.
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Will Windoze go to an official repository like Linux distros have? Only checked out and verified software. Or will they improve Windows to the point you don’t need all those extra utilities? It would seem a way to prevent a lot of malware.
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And recommended by LLMs as well…
AI chatbot-generated software recommendations to lure users into downloading GPU mining malware disguised as popular PC utilities
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Yeah, I don’t even like installing debs of actually verified software like Google Chrome, Mega Cloud, Viber etc. I always ask myself the question - why hasn’t this deb been packaged into a snap or a flatpak, because that’s where these apps belong. Some do have a snap and/or flatpak, but generally I’m suspicious of an app developer that makes just a deb/rpm but doesn’t bother to make a snap and/or flatpak. Why do I need to give this trivial app full system access?
That’s what I tell my customers as well, install all your software through Gnome Software or “the app store” as they like to call it, or the snap store or bazaar. Don’t just download & install random debs from the web, even if the site looks legit. An added bonus for me is less support calls 
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Never gonna happen Jim. M$ only cares about 2 types of customers, the enterprise high volume licence customer and the home user that can be milked for every cent they have, especially when the Win12 subscription model officially lands.
I can’t tell you how shocked I am how much my older customers for whom “PC=Windows” want to try something new like UM or LM to get away from all the ads, AI garbage and recall “feature” in Windows. They actually like the fact that they can install all their apps in UM or LM through the “app store”, in this case either gnome software or the software manager in LM - “just like on their phones”. It also makes them less nervous about installing malware and other garbage. M$ missed this trend big time, and now they are paying the price as long term Win users migrate away from Windows to something else - even chrome books!
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Welcome to the community @Nemo, thanks for joining us! 
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Ha, @nemo, you found us ! 
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Yes, they already have one for several years now. It’s called Microsoft app-store or something like that.
It is integrated in the OS (easily removable though).
They really tried with Windows 10 S.
They locked it down so it could only install apps from the Microsoft Store.
People were not happy with it so it failed.
Bit of a bummer though, since I know some people who would, securitywise, benefit tremendously from it.
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Yeah I read Ric’s @ricmarques post on the UM forum and signed up about a month ago. Ric’s a great bloke, always used to fix up the formatting in my support questions, which I really appreciated. Didn’t post earlier as I just had too much going on in the real world. That’s why I can’t understand these people that spend their whole day on X/Facebook/Instagram/Bluesky, how do they pay the mortgage/rent?!?!?!
Then Jim flagged my M$ post, have no idea why, so had to wait to be unblocked, he’s probably in the “get off my lawn you pesky kids!” phase of life.
Also had to fix a few small things around the apartment and now I’m finally here. Thanks for the warm welcome, it’s great to be here, looks like UM forum 2.0. The UM forum was the best linux forum on the net 
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So true Thom, and M$ dropped the ball big time with Windows S, I’ve even had customers comment about that.
I haven’t used Windows in 10 years, but I know the problem with the Win store is that there isn’t the depth of apps there. There’s greater depth in the Ubuntu repos, let alone the snap store and flathub. I’ve had customers ask me to move them over to a chromebook so that they can have the “install all the apps you need from the app store” experience. M$ dropped the ball big time on that trend and I don’t think they care as this type of user doesn’t generate enough revenue for them for them to actually care. At this point, they only care about their cloud & enterprise users as they generate the most revenue for them.
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Jim or jymm? I didn’t flag anyone’s post, I don’t even know how you do that, unless it was somehow an accident.
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Discourse AI is an official, modular plugin for the popular open-source community platform Discourse. The plugin adds artificial intelligence to online forums to support community managers and improve user experience. An important principle of the developers is that the AI supports human moderators and does not replace them.
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It’s all good Jim/Jymm. I personally thought you were having a bad day and pressed the wrong button. The moderators clearly saw that it was an accident and unblocked my account this morning. No harm, no foul, it’s all good
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@Nemo we really don’t actively police these forums. Especially in terms of actions. At most we will make internal notes in our staff area. But none of that happened with your post.
Last year we also added: Discourse AI - Spam detection - Site Management - Discourse Meta to our forums.
It helps protect members from SPAM and also the occasional malware links from bots and other automated traffic. I would say there’s a 3% to 5% false positive rate. Which continues to go down each time with a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning.
Once we noticed that your post was incorrectly flagged and hidden, it was then approved. SPAM filtering via this and two other tools, only applies to TL0 and TL1 members.
However, countless times its made sure that bogus and sometimes dangerous links do not get posted in our forums.
This plugin as recently as 4 hours ago flagged and removed SPAM with terrible travel and airfare advertising so that it was never visible to members.
You can read more about our policies here: Code of Conduct.
I hope this adds some clarity that no one was
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Thanks for the detailed explanation, greatly appreciated!
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I have never flagged anyone. At the most I have muted someone. I don’t know if this forum even has that feature, I had only ever used it once.
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