ASUS’ decisions to force unwanted software onto users has put them at risk, like with Armoury Crate, MyASUS and DriverHub, and even its “AI” security features in its routers. We sought peer review from a security researcher, Paul (aka “Mr Bruh”), to dig into the topics of ASUS’ vulnerabilities and exploits. If you have ASUS software installed, you should think about removing it – and you should minimally update it. Likewise, be careful of what data you feed into ASUS’ RMA and warranty system.
Previous ASUS videos!
- ASUS scammed us: youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY
- ASUS face-to-face on warranties: youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ZoCYXmF0Q
Yeah, ASUS is in an awful state. Their Armory Crate malware* really just takes the cake on the whole thing.
*It literally survives through a full format and will run and create popups on your computer without any human interaction if you buy an ASUS motherboard. It’s malware.
Not that I support Asus doing this in any way, but last I saw there was an option in BIOS to enable and disable automatic armoury crate installation. Hope that helps someone. :)
I never got why Asus is so beloved. The RoG branding is cringe even by motherboard branding standards, and the one Asus board I had (a M3A78) had a surprise showstopper incompatibility (hard crashes with a specific PCI-e card that worked fine on a LGA775 board and a Gigabyte 790X board) that their support refused to take responsibility for.
It’s like they’re still coasting on the goodwill from when they did a dual-Celeron board.
I bricked an Asus laptop 15 years ago because their instructions on performing a BIOS update didn’t include anything about what filesystem to use on the flash drive with the update file. I used NTFS (which was obviously a mistake in retrospect) and completely bricked the machine.
I tried calling their support line 30 times and never once got to talk to a human. I eventually just gave up on that laptop and replaced it with a Mac. I’ve been intensely sceptical of Asus products ever since then.
It shouldn’t have been able to read the drive if it was ntfs. That’s very weird
Also bios updates from USB ALWAYS require FAT even across platforms.
Yeah, it was a very foolish thing to do now that I know more. I was still a bit of a dumb kid though, and you’d think that their instructions would include something to that effect. Still, I wasn’t really upset at them for that. I was mad because I spent months trying to get any form of support and simply could not.
