GameGuard may have corrupted my system files

[Ethical Lune]

While I can't actually prove it, I am pretty sure GameGuard corrupted at least one of my system files.
I never had issues prior to installing Helldivers 2 and the malware its bundled with, but then all of a sudden the game started hard rebooting my PC out of the blue.
Two times of this and I decided that was enough as it's not worth risking software or even hardware damage just to play a video game, so I uninstalled GG using the tool provided and scoured every file and registry entry this pisstain of a program left behind.

Then when I was playing another game I didn't have any issues with before it was suddenly crashing repeatedly and often, the event viewer pointed to a system .dll file every time meaning it was most likely corrupted which it indeed was.
I soft reinstalled my OS and poof, problem gone for good. I even waited several days afterwards to see if that truly was the problem and turns out it was.

I don't expect this proof-less post to do anything and I doubt AH will ever remove this garbage rootkit but maybe at least some people can become aware that GameGuard can possibly cause real issues. While it may not cause problems for most people, it would seem it has a chance to do damage and I'm far from the only person that's had problems after installing GG.

[LongTimeAgo]

This is the exact experience I had back in the day.
My anti-virus (Kaspersky at the time) got in to a war with Gameguard and subsequently got a lot of system files corrupted. The only remedy was a full reïnstall of Windows.

It's entirely possible for this to happen, Gameguard writes/rewrites in the memory space of other processes. To what extent is unknown. But as any IT engineer can tell you... Tampering with running processes in memory space... Yeah, thats bad news and can lead to corruption of software and hardware.

Sadly, there is no way to prove it. Because of Gameguard inherent design that it leaves no trail and breadcrumbs while functioning from the Kernel. (or very little)

[Slasher]

Originally posted by Ethical Lune:

While I can't actually prove it, I am pretty sure GameGuard corrupted at least one of my system files.
I never had issues prior to installing Helldivers 2 and the malware its bundled with, but then all of a sudden the game started hard rebooting my PC out of the blue.
Two times of this and I decided that was enough as it's not worth risking software or even hardware damage just to play a video game, so I uninstalled GG using the tool provided and scoured every file and registry entry this pisstain of a program left behind.

Then when I was playing another game I didn't have any issues with before it was suddenly crashing repeatedly and often, the event viewer pointed to a system .dll file every time meaning it was most likely corrupted which it indeed was.
I soft reinstalled my OS and poof, problem gone for good. I even waited several days afterwards to see if that truly was the problem and turns out it was.

I don't expect this proof-less post to do anything and I doubt AH will ever remove this garbage rootkit but maybe at least some people can become aware that GameGuard can possibly cause real issues. While it may not cause problems for most people, it would seem it has a chance to do damage and I'm far from the only person that's had problems after installing GG.

You aren't the first to have that happen. NPGG is almost by definition malware by the way it behaves in the system. Give it is low level kernal access the damage it can do if it happens to behave erratically is ridiculous, which is why root kits have always and will always be classified as malware.

[kripcision]

damn, i was just coming on to these forums to see if i could disable GG from running on pc while i'm not playing my game, but if there is any chance of messing up my copy of windows i wont bother installing it on windows (reinstalling windows is not something i want to do again), that said, i read that you can play this game on linux so dual booting the game on linux would prevent it from messing up anything important.

[Calibre]

Probably the only option in order to play it "safely" would be to run it on a virtual machine, giving it access to a system that is completely isolated from your actual OS and hardware. But it shouldn't be necessary to go through a lot of cumbersome hoops just to play a damn game.

[LongTimeAgo]

Originally posted by Calibre:

Probably the only option in order to play it "safely" would be to run it on a virtual machine, giving it access to a system that is completely isolated from your actual OS and hardware. But it shouldn't be necessary to go through a lot of cumbersome hoops just to play a damn game.

It wont work under a virtual machine.
Your only safest bet is using a Linux machine.
It will only run in the Proton sandbox and can not get out of there.
Proton being a "mimic'ed Windows installation" so to speak, a translation layer for the games. The game will think it's running on windows and Gameguard will think that as well.