u/tren0r

Hi! Bit of a story time: This january I bought a brand new usb stick because I wanted to do a clean install of windows. I have previously wanted to try out Linux Mint but after a month I decided that I’d like to go back to windows. I downloaded rufus and a windows 11 iso on my dad’s pc from the official website, used rufus while the pc was disconnected from the internet and installed windows on my own pc.

Fast forward to now: I wanted to do another clean windows install, just nuke everything and start fresh. I didn’t directly experience any suspicious stuff (I have all my accounts and everything), I just wanted to be sure. Now, I found the usb stick that I used to install windows in January, i plugged it into my PC and just for the sake of it, I decided to put some files on virustotal There was a setup.exe which seemed fine but then I put a setup.dll on virustotal that came out suspicious. The ai overview (I think?) said that it is malware, but then when I went into the details section I noticed that the previous filenames was quite weird (and I shit you not, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but it's not a joke, one of the filenames was femboyp*rno.exe), also I noticed that the creation time was 2051 or something.

Now the reason why I’m being quite stressed out is because I downloaded the iso from the official microsoft website. Is my dad’s computer compromised and the malware injected itself into the iso the moment I downloaded it on my dad’s pc and have I been using a compromised pc all year long? I’ve ran multiple scans both with windows defender and a free trial version of malwarebytes on my pc. Nothing was found. I even did it in offline mode, nothing was found.

My accounts seem fine and the only suspicious things that happened while browsing is that sometimes I had to complete a captha on google and one of the job searching websites because it said I had suspicious traffic. Since then, I installed linux mint on my pc because I still had that separate usb with me, although I would prefer to go back to windows. So could someone explain what exactly is going on? Also, is my whole entire network is compromised because of that ‘suspicious traffic’ thing?

I’m sorry that I made a post this long but I wanted to make sure I wrote all the details. Any help will be very much appreciated
Here's the VT link:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/72a0bcac2d4de630ad094bfc312bd4431aa5c286c683de7e0650c1675e5fc7c5

I am on CachyOS, latest 26.1 mesa drivers, DLL swapped to fsr 4.1. cachyos proton 11, 9060XT 16gb
i hope the video isnt too blurry and laggy, you can see the water near the trees in the focus of the video have subtle grainy effects, akin to white noise, that take time to resolve and stabilize, when i turn my camera. it is mainly the water that gets this artifacting, mainly at an angle. In the past ive also had the grass and tree foliage in the plains have a similar issue. I'll assume youtube's compression will have made it harder to notice but i assure you all that it is quite noticable and distracting for me.

The issue persists regardless of proton ge, or CachyOS proton. The Issue persists whether it's the built in fsr 4.0.3 or the dll swapped 4.1. persists on all fsr presets. If I turn off FSR the flickering artifacting is gone entirely. This persists with or without framegen too. The game's built in xess doesnt have this issue (tho id rather not play on that bcz its lower quality). Currently not using any mods, only ReFramework.

I've tried swapping different protons, swapping back and forth FSR versions, adding and removing steam launch args to no avail. I've tried to google for similar problems but i've been unsuccessful, hence the post. I don't know if this is an issue exclusive to linux or not so any addifional info, if available would be appreciated!!!