The original post: /r/techsupport by /u/Electrical_Dingo_411 on 2024-04-28 17:17:16.
Hi. So I hope you don’t mind the recent nature of my account that’s because I’ve been quite anxious about some stuff regarding my laptop’s security and I couldn’t find anything that sufficiently answered my questions on the net ,and as such I thought making an account and asking it here would be the best option.
So my question has to do with rootkits. I never heard of them prior to something that happened to a game I just downloaded and truth be told I’m pretty worried right now. The game in question was Apex Legends on pc ( I played it alot on console but wanted to try it on pc) I installed the game and promptly deleted it after I found out that it had a major security problem last month. This took me down a rabbit hole of anti cheats and how invasive they are.
They apparently run with the highest level access on your pc and I was legitimately shocked. I vaguely remember Battleye asking if I was OK with it installing itself to my pc which I refused ( ARK ) however I didn’t know all anti cheats do this (easyanticheat which apex uses didn’t notify me). Some people online argue that in case a vulnerability is discovered on said anti cheat. Any party can do whatever they well wish with my data. Now that for me was the nightmare scenario.
I basically took a usb that had a windows 11 install on it and plugged it in. At first the pc booted normally to the desktop because I forgot to change the boot order in BIOS ( this is important ) but after figuring it out I chose the custom install ,formatted and deleted all the partitions then reinstalled windows. However I’m still scared that I may still be at risk of the rootkit still being present or a hack/virus present from the apex fiasco.
So with all that being said, here are my questions and I genuinely thank you if you answer them.
- How invasive are anti cheats like EasyAntiCheat?
- Could the anti cheat still be lingering in my system even though I formatted and deleted all partitions and did a clean reinstall?
- How likely is it that my USB upon booting into my desktop instead of the reinstall screen could have been infected/have the anti cheat load into it and such have just reinstalled the anti cheat with the clean reinstall of the OS.
- Could I have gotten a virus from the Apex Legends hack? Since some people argued that it was remote code execution. I played it for 2 hours at most before deleting.
- Does having secure boot on protect me even if I have a rootkit or virus on my laptop.