Windows 11 has attracted a lot of interest and as they always do with any software or event, cybercriminals are trying to take advantage of it. Kaspersky has warned of the presence of fake Windows 11 installers to distribute malware, adware, and other malicious tools.
The security company says it has detected “hundreds” of infection attempts using similar schemes related to Windows 11. These are varied and range from relatively harmless adware that security solutions do not usually classify as malware to more dangerous Trojans, password stealers, and exploits of all kinds.
Considering that this is malware camouflaged in the operating system itself, whoever ‘catches’ the virus is dead. “Although Microsoft has made the process of downloading and installing Windows 11 from its official website quite simple, many users visit other sources to download the software, and often it’s not Windows at all,” says Kaspersky.
A large part of the detected malware consists of downloaders, whose task as the name says is to install other malicious payloads on computers. The security firm has given the example of a fraudulent file circulating on the net called ‘download manager for 86307_windows 11 builds 21996.1 x64 + activator.
It is 1.75 Gbytes in size and its very name and extension should already make us suspicious. For starters, build 21996.1 is an outdated build that was leaked before the official release of the operating system and an activator that is a single, useless DLL library file.
Furthermore, Microsoft will never deliver an operating system this way. It is even delivered with a supposed license agreement. “If you accept the agreement, it will install a variety of malicious programs on your machine,” they say.
Kaspersky advises avoiding any unofficial installation methods or downloading ISO images outside of Microsoft’s servers. As we saw in the Windows 11 installation guide, the only official way Microsoft has provided so far is to activate the Windows Insider program on a Windows 10 machine to upgrade from there.
As for ISOs, Microsoft has not provided the general public with images either. Beware of those offered on the Internet, because there are no guarantees and can be anything. Even the method of obtaining the ISO that we offered you in that article is not official, although it does not contain malware and is obtained from Microsoft servers. Beware of these fake Windows 11 installers… We don’t think Microsoft will take long to release the official ISO images.
