Asus holiday popup sparks malware scare among users
Facepalm: Oh dear, Asus. By trying to get into the holiday season, the company has managed to annoy a number of its customers by making them believe they’d been infected with malware. The end result of the alarmingly named Christmas.exe is a desktop banner that takes up a third of the screen – and it can even crash apps.
Several people were understandably horrified recently when an intrusive banner featuring a Christmas wreath with festive lights and a red button in the center appeared on their desktops, as shown above.
As noted by Windows Latest, several users who saw the banners have posted on forums asking if this is some new form of malware. The fact it is associated with a process called Christmas.exe exacerbated those fears.
But it turns out that the banner isn’t malware. It’s actually part of the festive events option in Asus’ Armoury Crate software, which comes pre-installed on some Asus PCs and can be downloaded to customize certain Asus hardware.
The banner is just a holiday-themed splash screen, but Asus doesn’t even include the company name or explain what it is. The banner eventually disappears, and it doesn’t appear in the task manager unless it’s kept open.
“I can’t imagine there won’t be consequences for suddenly introducing an intrusive forced pop up with no name, no information, that’s vanishing without any trace afterwards, showing in the first layer above everything else. That’s what a virus does,” wrote Redditor Avrael_Asgard.
“Turn on my PC and log in to see a janky, stretched neon christmas “game” running across my desktop. Immediately think I’m being ransomwared (look up christmas-themed malware). No ASUS logo in sight,” complained a user on Asus’ own forum.
The Armoury Crate software has long been highlighted as the worst element of most Asus products. It has improved slightly over the years, admittedly, but most people still hate it.
If you want to get rid of the screen banner, you can do so by going into the Aura Effects section of the Armoury Create app and toggling Festive Effects off. But the best option is problably to uninstall Armoury Crate altogether. Those with an Asus motherboard might have to enter the BIOS to disable a feature that downloads and installs the software automatically.
Asus hasn’t had the best year when it comes to maintaining good public relations. The company was forced to apologize after YouTube channel Gamers Nexus returned an Asus ROG Ally handheld (bought to review) to the firm so it could repair a thumbstick problem under warranty.
Asus rejected the claim because of what it called a damaged chassis; a dent so small that a microscope was required to see it. There was also mention of liquid damage, something Gamers Nexus said “came out of nowhere,” and faulty connectors, which GN knew nothing about. Asus said it required $191 to fix the damage, ignoring the joystick problem that it was sent in for, and even suggested that not paying the money could lead to the Ally being sent back disassembled. It led to a flood of stories about the firm’s poor RMA process.
