Concern about malware being installed with spacedesk
Hii,
posting this on behalf of someone else:
On my 5th hour factory resetting my desktop and laptop after downloading space desk yesterday. They were both running fine before but after space desk I’m getting unusual high cpu, ram and 100% desk use. 100%…
“Service host” and “endpoint protection” weren’t on pcs’ before and they certainly weren’t using up so much capacity. Especially after uninstalling spacedesk and reseting without wiping the disc, them still being there is a very bad development. Now resetting for the second time and wiping disc.
Whether or not it’s a harmful virus is not my point, I get that people have been using it for years but it’s malware nonetheless. Who knows what it does running in the background, maybe even accessing your network.
The difficulty many have to uninstall spacedesk doesn’t really help the cause.
I’m interested for an explanation or similar experience, as apparently there was essentially nothing else on their PC and that timing is weird.
Hi @arne,
In the documentation, there is a complete list of what the spacedesk Driver package installs in the PC. It can be found here. Service host and endpoint protection are processes coming from different publishers (service host is included in Windows, while endpoint protection can be from either Windows Defender or some other Antivirus software) and are not installed with spacedesk.
Another question is where they got the installer from. The only official downloads of the spacedesk Driver package is from the Download page of the spacedesk website here: https://www.spacedesk.net/download. You can also find links there to download the different spacedesk Viewers for different platforms. Downloading it from any other source potentially exposes the user’s PC from malware that might have been included into the installer by the 3rd party host website.
Regarding the uninstallation issue, unless there were errors in the uninstallation, there should not be any files left. Can you specify which files were left or if there were any error messages encountered during uninstallation?
As an additional point, spacedesk doesn’t even require the internet for it to run, only needing a local area network such as a wifi router, or a direct USB connection, so it doesn’t even make sense to add any sort of malware if the intention of it is to retrieve files or add the PC to a botnet.