But the company found that over 57,000 users of its security software had the backdoored version of the ASUS utility installed, leading to the extrapolation that around a million people may have been affected in total. Kaspersky says that just 600 MAC addresses appear to have been of interest to the criminals behind the hack. It is thought that the malware campaign - news of which was first shared by Motherboard - was originally intended to target just a handful of people. Microsoft reveals Russian hacking attacks as it expands AccountGuard protection across Europe.
As a result features such as Windows Fan Control (AI Suite & Fan Expert,) along with the heavily promoted Aura Sync are a mess. My latest experience is about a Rampage VI Extreme that is advertised with a huge list of features that unfortunately many of them depend of software in order to work.
I have been an Asus customer for more than 15 years owning over 20 motherboards and graphics cards.I am not complaining about their hardware but damn their software team (if there is a proper team) must be either underfunded or lacking knowledge at a very high degree. Whenever you see "Asus" & "Software" in the same sentence prepare yourself for an adventure.
Who knows what recent motherboard BIOS updates have pushed into your PC through this method. Kaspersky claims that ASUS has since been "largely unresponsive since then and has not notified ASUS customers about the issue." ASUS is already drowning in bad-rep from the PC enthusiast community for its Armoury Crate feature that lets motherboard BIOS push software to a Windows installation through an ACPI table dubbed "the vendor's rootkit," which ASUS enabled by default on new motherboards. Kaspersky even sent a technically-sound representative to meet with ASUS in February. The cybersecurity firm says it discovered the malware in January 2019 when implementing a new supply-chain detection technology, and informed ASUS by late-January. Kaspersky Labs says that as many as half a million devices have fallen prey to malware pushed to them by ASUS. Hackers have managed to use valid ASUS digital certificates to masquerade their malware as legitimate software updates from ASUS. Smartphones and IoT devices by ASUS are also affected. These include not just PC motherboards, but also pre-builts such as notebooks and desktops by ASUS.
In a chilling reminder of just why system software should always be manually updated and never automatically, Vice Motherboard citing Kaspersky Labs reports that hackers have compromised the Live Update servers of ASUS, making them push malware to thousands of computers configured to fetch and install updates automatically.