eva_lewis•19d agoProlific Poster

Serious warning about those old Winamp skins from 2004

I just lost a whole folder of music files because of a Winamp skin I downloaded years ago. The skin had some hidden script that renamed my tracks to gibberish after I clicked a wrong button. Back then we thought it was just a fun custom look, but that thing buried malware in the system. I only caught it when my external drive started acting weird last night. Now I'm scanning everything with three different antivirus tools and it's a mess. Has anyone else run into old media player plugins causing damage like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivera.susan19d ago

2004 called and they want their sketchy skin back lol. That sucks though, I had a Winamp plugin back in the day that straight up deleted my entire System32 folder on accident. I blame that era when nobody thought scanning a .wsz file with antivirus was necessary. 3 scanners is overkill honestly, just run Malwarebytes and call it a day.

grayt4619d agoTop Commenter

...and that's why I STILL have trust issues with any file that ends in .wsz. @rivera.susan is right about just running Malwarebytes though, I keep that thing on a USB stick for emergencies like this. Honestly I'm surprised my old Winamp collection didn't nuke my system sooner, guess my terrible music taste saved me from the really bad skins.