If you’re looking to download MSI Afterburner, take a moment to check if the website is the real deal. MSI warns that it’s the latest target of scammers pretending to ship the software in order to piggyback viruses, trojans, keyloggers, and other nasty malware onto your gaming PC.
With the domain name disguised as afterburner-msi.space, it looks official enough if you just want to install the software and quickly tinker with your GPU settings, but it has no affiliation with MSI. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t visit this suspicious URL and if you wind up on the webpage, don’t download anything. Instead, head to the official Afterburner website.
Thankfully, the impersonating site isn’t likely to catch many people out as it doesn’t currently appear on a quick Google search and MSI is doing all it can to remove the imposter to prevent further harm. Don’t panic if you’ve fallen into the trap, however, as there are plenty of steps you can take to remove malware from your system and keep yourself protected.
To help you navigate the fraudulent minefield that is the World Wide Web, ProPrivacy’s Andreas Theodorou advises that you always “check the URL to see if it matches that of the official site, and if it doesn’t you may be walking right into a cybercriminal’s trap.”
He recommends you “always check what comes before the ‘.com’, and if it doesn’t match or there are any other questionable differences, it’s best to err on the side of caution, contact the support team, and see if you can manually navigate to the official website’s homepage.” For example, https://www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards is the official link, with MSI as the domain name and Afterburner located in the path after the first forward slash.
And even if you take all the right precautions and your PC shows no signs of a virus, it’s worth giving it a digital clean every so often, just to be on the safe side.
