Wallpaper Engine has long been the primary driver for modern gamers’ screens, allowing them to put just about anything on there, whether it’s a static image or a fully-rendered scene from their favorite games.
And being readily available to millions of users who consume community-made wallpapers on the daily is great, but also fertile ground for nefarious users who seem to be loading their creations with malicious code. According to Kaspersky (via PC Gamer), dozens of user-made wallpapers appear to come packaged with viruses and have so far accrued thousands of downloads each, potentially compromising a lot of people’s PCs.
One example seemed straight up legit, but as Kaspersky notes, it was merely working “in the background” by installing a DarkKomet backdoor that’d harvest Steam account information and even take over active sessions.
But what’s most interesting from the report is that most of the wallpapers seem to be anime-related, or just anime girls or anime-style drawings of Elden Ring characters like Marika. Wallpaper Engine is flooded with popular scenes from video games, anime, and manga, but also tens of thousands of anime girl wallpapers, animated or otherwise.
So, if you’re a connoisseur of waifus, you may want to double-check who you’re downloading the wallpapers from. You never know when your waifu is holding a malware-infused knife behind her back, just waiting for you to drop your guard one day.
Or you could join the OLED side and simply put a black screen on. It’s that easy.
