College was huge for me. Much more diversity in the people and better chances of making friends with mature, educated people (not to say that they don’t exist outside of college, just that the pickings were much easier/reliable)

Could be. However, the point stands, you’re gonna get what you pay for in the end. Not trying to be a dick ofc, but that’s the reality.

There are some well performing options that are free, but they are limited, and not too common imo

If anyone does have some good options, feel free to share as I may be unaware of them and think learning about them would be neat

And you got what you paid for, no?

I believe there is a free version as well but don’t think just because you’re installing Linux that you’re somehow safer.

There was just a package that was essentially socially engineered into by a hacker, who then had full access to everyone’s shit.

All because a GitHub author was pressured into letting them contribute to code. Mac/Apple are no different and starting to be more and more vulnerable as the “security by obscurity” wears off.

Free tools are fine and well, but that stuff is done for free. Including maintainence and everything else. In times like these, ain’t nobody got time for that anymore. People need to make a living and you will see degradation in the products thusly

I’ll also toss this hat into the ring - sysmon this is essentially a logging tool thats a bit better/nicer than the windows default, and categorizes all logs into very neat buckets that will make watching out for strange shit much much easier.

Sysmon is part of the sysinternals suite (vetted by the community + microsoft, which is sayin somethin lol) and you can make use this as the config file to use (Uses industry-standard MITRE Att&ck framework) which you can then use to correlate to more threats/malware authors/malware artifacts if you really wanna get your hands dirty/have some fun

Bitdefender usually goes on sale too - check for coupon codes, don’t pay full price. Plus you get like 5 devices with your license IIRC. Worth a shot

Here’s probably all the info you could ever need:

https://redcanary.com/blog/threat-intelligence/raspberry-robin/

Next, you need to get your systems scanned and cleaned. Malware bytes is likely enough, but I always recommend BitDefender. Their efficacy rates are always fantastic, and they have been leading the industry for several years now. Download the AV on a clean system, put on clean flash drive, and install that way.

Last, you’re gonna need to reset your passwords. Yes, I know that’s toxic af. But this is the reality and why we always need to be veeeery careful with what we do. This worm communicates with a c2 server which means it can update itself which makes detection hard, and it also means that, at one point it may have been spying on your activity (and it likely was if not continues to)

This stuff happens, don’t beat yourself up too much. Live and learn

One day those Linux people will learn that you’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar

🤷🏻‍♂️