Many New PCs in China Come With Malware Preinstalled
In China, there is not much you have to do to contract a virus on your PC. Plus, you have a one in five chance that you will get that first virus on your brand new PC right out of the box.
Microsoft revealed this finding in a new whitepaper and attributes the high rate of infections of PCs to a shaky supply chain structure that does not prevent the presence of counterfeit products. To lower the cost of a new PC, potentially compromised products are sometimes knowingly accepted. It does not take much to see that this scenario is a goldmine for malware makers and allows the malware business to flourish.
In its whitepaper Microsoft said that in some instances malware strains were contacting a known malware hosting source, 3322.org, and added infected PCs to the Nitol DDoS botnet. There were "500 different strains of malware hosted on more than 70,000 subdomains," Microsoft said.
Following its discovery, Microsoft acquired control of the domain via a court order on September 10. In addition to Nitol, Microsoft said that it also found malware "capable of remotely turning on an infected computer’s microphone and video camera, potentially giving a cybercriminal eyes and ears into a victim’s home or business", as well as malware "that records a person’s every key stroke, allowing cybercriminals to steal a victim’s personal information."
Microsoft said that its recent actions will "reduce the impact of the menacing and disturbing threats associated with Nitol and the 3322.org domain". However, there is no effect on the overall infrastructure how malware finds its way into the supply chain. This case is clearly limited to China, but given the increasing concern about counterfeit products, it may be a smart move and common sense to run an anti-malware scan on your next new PC when you turn it on for the first time. Just in case.

Funny thing, all the bloatware that prebuilt pcs and laptops have make the pc slower than if it was infected.
I made a petition, posted it in the comments of a few "China hackers..." articles, and no one signed it. Maybe everyone's too scared, which means it's too late.
Funny thing, all the bloatware that prebuilt pcs and laptops have make the pc slower than if it was infected.
China is cut from the internet from the inside, except the government sponsored hackers spying from corporations, advance military to cut short their R&D.
Ahh, bringing back memories. Who didn't love getting a new computer with a shiny new copy of Windows Me installed and two dozen HP programs you couldn't remove to "help" you by consuming all of your whopping 128MB of memory.
And YES Aoneone: to typical people - it IS rocket science.
It is not uncommon for the younger generation, IT pros, or hobbiests to take the complexities of IT for granted...but to some re-installing and configuring the OS is complex. ...just as rebuilding an engine would be to a
lot of us IT oriented folks.
Run Ubuntu and get secure computing.
Unfortunately this is standard for PCs. You merely get a recovery partition, where you can restore all the trialware, malware, and bloat that was originally installed. The option for physical media is unreasonably expensive from major manufacturers. And while it may be easy for some to simply download an ISO and use the OEM key you have, most people are unable to properly burn/mount an ISO, much less download one. Everyone who is able to service their own PC needs to consider themselves lucky and not simply assume everyone is capable of that.