Micro-Star International, the computer hardware company better known as MSI, is warning users about a fake website that’s almost a perfect copy of the official site.
As MSI explains, the malicious website claims to offer downloads for the MSI Afterburner software, which is used for viewing and tweaking the settings on MSI graphics cards. However, the downloads may contain malware and therefore will attempt to infect your system upon installation.
The official Afterburner download is available from https://www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards, where as the fraudulent site is being hosted at afterburner-msi.space (please don’t visit that page!). It copies the design of the official site and the URL is believable enough to fool anyone not paying full attention. The problem is made worse by the fact that the official Afterburner software download is offline at the moment due to maintenance, meaning users are looking for an alternative link and finding this website.
It shouldn’t take long for the most popular web browsers to start flagging the site as suspicious, and Firefox already has as confirmed by an attempted visit to the URL while writing this. I doubt it will be long before MSI has the official download link working again due to the threat currently posed by this malicious website. As usual, the advice is always to check the address of a website before downloading anything and then to use a good security suite to scan the download before installing it.
