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You Must Download That ViGEm Bus Driver Update

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I was working on my laptop and got this update popup:

Two update popups side by side. The first indicates updates are availible and the second describes it as a critical security bulletin

It seemed sketchy so I looked it up and the initial search results were all under an hour old, similar to how I discovered that TwitterX closed off. Thanks to Reddit, it turns out that the update is not only legit but it’s something you shouldn’t ignore.

In short, the domain the project used to communicate updates had a trademark conflict so the maintainers had to retire it. They wouldn’t control of the domain anymore so a bad actor could get your IP. To stop this, this update downloads a tool which changes where the updates are pulled from. The sketchy update was the only way to they could communicate this.

As for what ViGEm was used for, it’s a dependency for DS4Windows, a PlayStation controller mapper for Windows. I installed it when I was trying to play Need for Speed Most Wanted on my laptop.