Latest news with #ArmouryCrate
National Post
06-05-2025
- National Post
ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 review: A gaming laptop with impressive visuals and power in one
Article content After a couple weeks of use, I was a bit concerned with the battery. It's got 90Wh capacity, but I would charge it up, watch an hour or so of Netflix before bed, close the lid, and I'd wake up to the battery below 10%. I was a little worried. After a bit of digging, I realized that I had kept the laptop in 'Ultimate' GPU mode in Armoury Crate, and I'd changed the Performance Mode from 'Windows' to 'Performance' or other options depending on my use via the fan button (FN+F5). Without knowing, I'd bypassed the Windows power and sleep settings, and was now idling my GPU far higher than it needed to for just watching movies or other casual tasks. Article content Once I'd sorted that out I was seeing completely reasonable battery usage, and the laptop would lose maybe a percent or two while asleep overnight. While gaming though, with full CPU, GPU and cooling engaged and game settings cranked, that 90Wh capacity gets chewed up in 2-3 hours depending on the game. Article content The A/C adapter is a beefy 240W brick with a proprietary connection. Both of these I grew to live with since they grant 50% charge in 30 mins with fast charging. It turns out Thunderbolt 4 can handle up to 100w, so there's actually an option for you if you've got another charging brick and quality USB C cable. I repurposed another 60w laptop charger I had with a USB C connection, a cable I got off Amazon, and I was able to get pretty solid charging out of it. Probably about half speed, and no fast charging obviously. I don't know what effect that may have on the battery long term, but I'd assume it's minimal given it's charging slower than with the stock charger. Article content Armoury crate Article content With powerful hardware comes a desire for control, and that's where Armoury Crate (AC) comes in. It's not just a way to monitor performance and make little tweaks, it's like performance tuning software for a race car. There's honestly too much to get into, but this is where you can manage everything from Aura lighting to cooling and GPU performance via discrete modes. 'Ultimate' mode even engages the MUX switch which bypasses the CPU for graphics processing to push frames right from the dedicated GPU directly to the display to boost frame rates and reduce latency. Article content AC also lets you remap the 4 customizable hotkeys above the keyboard, though frustratingly, there isn't an option to map any to enable/disable the Slash Lighting on the lid. A gripe shared by a number of folks online who eventually turned to GHelper, a popular 3rd party alternative billing itself as a lighter weight option; though there's sure to be some tweaking to manage both hardware and windows compatibility. Article content There's a lot to be discovered and tinkered with in AC, and that's part of its value, but it's also part of its downfall. The user experience is not ideal, and it took me hours to actually find the GPU modes and slash lighting settings because they were buried in sub menus or only revealed after clicking a 'System Settings' button which is a totally different UX than the rest of the menus on the left of the screen. Article content I tested a few AAA games with the ROG Zephyrus G16, as well as an old favourite just to see how it might change solely based on hardware, and each time I was blown away. Article content Black Myth: Wukong Article content This was the first game I tried, and right out of the gate in the first battle where you're introduced to Wukong and face-off against some towering gods up in the clouds, the particle physics and the lighting actually made me pause the game and restart just to play the intro again. The lighting and effects were staggering. Article content Article content Cyberpunk has the benefit of being one of the ~700 titles that can take full advantage of all the new features in the NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs. There's full support for frame generation, and other DLSS features I've been talking about earlier. It was clear even in the games' internal graphics benchmark that they were able to shine. Article content Both the light and dark scenes popped and looked super realistic. Reflections too were stunning and mirrored the landscape nicely as you moved through a scene. The contrast and textures on offer in the gritty dystopian setting of this game were particularly striking on the OLED display. Article content Article content Perhaps because I am such a fan of the game, but also since I've been playing it since launch day in 2016 on PS4, PS5, and then PS5 Pro, I was particularly floored with the look and feel of No Man's Sky when I tried it on the Zephyrus G16. I was surprised to see that the game supported DLSS, frame generation, up to 240 fps in certain situations like the galactic map, and just generally looked drop dead gorgeous. Details I never knew existed were suddenly rendered before my eyes, and it's brought new life to the game.
Forbes
28-03-2025
- Forbes
These Hackers Use Your GPU To Load Password-Stealing Malware
Never underestimate hackers' ingenuity. I learned this very early on in my hacking career, and it's as accurate now as it was in the late 1980s. What's more, this mantra unfortunately applies to hackers of the criminal variety as well as those who do so much good work. Remember, hacking is not a crime until it is. A case in point is when it comes to the deployment of infostealer malware. You know, the software that is being used by so many cybercriminals to compromise credentials, leading to account theft as well as vast quantities of stolen passwords being traded on the dark web. The latest example can be found by hackers using the CoffeeLoader family that executes code using the system GPU in order to evade detection. Graphics cards and the software surrounding them are not a new target for cybercriminals. Whether it's security vulnerabilities in GPU display drivers, or virtual GPU software, you can bet your bottom dollar that hackers are looking out for ways to exploit this powerful part of your system. Infostealer malware attacks that use the GPU are not something I have come across before, at least not to my failing old-man memory. However, CoffeeLoader hackers seem to be employing just this methodology to launch attacks. In a March 26 posting, Brett Stone-Gross, the senior director of threat intelligence at Zscaler, detailed precisely how the CoffeeLoader malware family is being deployed with the help of your graphics card. The whole purpose of the CoffeeLoader malware is to evade detection and bypass security protections in order to download and execute second-stage payloads, the infostealers in question. CoffeeLoader achieves this by employing a sophisticated packer utilizing the GPU as well as call stack spoofing and sleep obfuscation. 'The loader leverages a packer, which we named Armoury,' Stone-Gross said, 'that executes code on a system's GPU to hinder analysis in virtual environments.' The use of packers is a typical behavior of malware families, but the unpacking of the samples contained is rarely mentioned in security reports because, well, it's pretty boring and largely of little importance in the broader scheme of things. This is not the case with CoffeeLoader thanks to the clearly distinguishable packer used that can leverage the GPU in such a way as to execute initial malware code to complicate the threat analysis process. Zscaler ThreatLabz has named this packer Armoury 'because it impersonates the legitimate Armoury Crate utility created by ASUS.' Zscaler has said that CoffeeLoader has been observed being deployed with SmokeLoader, sold as a crimewave kit that includes password-stealing as part of the package. Smoke was subject to law enforcement disruption in 2024, having been active for many years, but apparently, that hasn't killed it off.
