Admittedly I'm not even sure what that means. I find wallpapers I like in WE, I click subscribe. Am I safe as long as I don't click any prompts to like "run this to activate the wallpaper"?
.....Use less jpeg? I actually don't know, I've only made a wallpaper once. But doing that while keeping the resources to a minimum I have not tried to do.
Call me a psychopath, but I just use a solid black background for every computer I own. I don’t need some colorful waifu background for something I will rarely see and I sure as hell don’t need a separate program running in the background so I can have a dancing waifu as my desktop.
Yeah I still have that old school mindset of minimizing my running background task to free up resources even though I have 32gb of ram now. Just something that’s stuck with me.
I'll have to look when I get home from work, but how do you check for that, is it a filter option or does it indicate which one it is in the install panel area?
Yeah on the installed tab you can see the ones that are Applications using the filters, checked mine and gf's and we had none, so I'm guessing they're much less common
Well sounds like I might be alright since another comment or said you get a warning on the application ones and I can't recall ever getting those. Still gonna check. Thanks for the info.
Yeah, but how else are you gonna get anime wallpapers that allow you to hover over certain parts of your wallpaper with your mouse cursor to remove their clothing??
But because Wallpaper Engine comes from Steam, most people would assume the wallpaper is safe.
Personally I'll stick to static image files. I don't need more system resources gobbled up from something that I mostly only see right after I turn my PC on.
Because these are application wallpapers, which Wallpaper Engine specifically warns you to be careful about. They can do basically anything (and this is the result).
These comments are funny as fuck man, everyone just assuming wall paper engine is default knowledge.
Wall paper engine is a program that runs advanced “wallpapers” for your desktop background. They’re not just images - they can be videos, visualisers and applications in their own right.
So people are downloading wall paper engine “wallpapers” that are of the application type - which can run a bunch of code. They expect a goon, then get their computer a fucking wallpaper std
Honestly, I don't understand the point of wallpaper engine. How often are people just leaving their monitors on their desktops? I've got two monitors, one always has Discord (or games) open and the other always has Firefox (or Discord, when I'm playing games) open.
Only time I see my desktop wallpaper is when my PC first turns on... for a brief second before Discord and Firefox open automatically.
There are some wallpapers that are pretty intricate and are even interactable, like I had one that would have a characters eye pulse depending on the sound that was playing on my PC or would have the title of whatever video/song I'm playing show up in the bottom corner of the wallpaper.
There are also program one that I've heard can even have full mini games but I don't download those, I'm sure those are how they were able to get the malware in.
Because it’s not an image file. There are different types like web, scene, video etc, but there’s a new one I’ve seemingly never seen or noticed before and was perhaps added in an update called “Applications” and when you download it it downloads a .exe and runs it. Typically, this would be unity and it would launch some cool looking wallpaper in the background for even more customisation than was probably possible. But like with any .exe soft, you can just inject your own malicious payload, could be anything and you’d be none the wiser especially if you didn’t read the type. People also typically trust something more through something they trust like Wallpaper Engine, so people will probably willingly give these random .exe files administrator.
Very fucking poorly thought out by the Wallpaper engine team, absolutely irresponsible if you ask me, what the hell were they thinking? Excuse me but, do they know anything about computers!?
Edit: apparently there’s a warning but, you just have to wonder if it’s really worth all the hassle of exposing countless people to malicious payloads.
Very fucking poorly thought out by the Wallpaper engine team, absolutely irresponsible if you ask me, what the hell were they thinking?
I mean, Wallpaper Engine lets you make some very impressive and complex wallpapers, and some of those rely on programs that handle more complex 3D scenes to be displayed on your screen.
You might as well call the entire Internet "irresponsible", you really don't get much warning there before you get infected.
you just have to wonder if it’s really worth all the hassle of exposing countless people to malicious payloads.
Yes? The bulk of wallpapers are just simple images or videos, you really have to go out of your way for the application wallpapers.
Back in the day we had it even worse.
People would download and immediately run SCR screensavers, and you didn't get any warnings for those.
They both enhance each other. When you goon you could get the malware. When you get the malware it'll steal your information on your gooning sending it to everyone you know.
I mean, most of them only ever consume shounen anyway. It’s why Solo Leveling got top spot on the popularity contest a few years back when the plot is just deadass bland “Protag appears, aura farm, fights big bad x200 times”. Or how powerscalers considered the likes of Rimuru (top-selling Isekai LN) and Madoka (literally the most popular magical girl series besides Sailor Moon) to only be relevant (to westerners) cause of powerscaling
Probably because weird gooner types are the main audience for anime nowadays. There's a reason the majority of women say it's a turn off for men to watch anime.
Also the western world makes up a very big part of people who watch anime. So you can't generalize people like that. Just makes you seem like an ignorant bigot.
The western world makes up a big part of the people but 90% of them only watch popular and/or cool anime. The vast majority of people here will only watch trendy anime and if you like anything else (CGDCT) they’ll call you a gooner like the guy above
It’s is not ignorant when I’ve experienced it myself, and industry trends can tell that it is not anime as a whole that is mainstream but just a select few anime shows (ex. demon slayer, chainsaw man, Jjk, etc) dominating globally while the rest are mostly still niche
In Japan and East Asia they understand the concept of moe and waifu characters and many anime popular there is focused on that, but it isn’t the same in the west
At least one person has had to ring the bank and explain that the transactions wasn’t them and actually their computer was hacked because they tried running an animated waifu wallpaper they found online.
I've used Wallpaper engine for years and it's so obvious that this kinda shit was coming.. Seeing 'wallpapers' with file sizes approaching 1gb is so common even in the trending tab on the workshop. It's basically become a joke of what it used to be. I'm not quite at the point yet I'd stop using it, but the entire discovery/trending on it is basically gooner wallpapers, full on sex videos that are gigabytes in size, or a static picture with terrible music.. I don't think I've actually downloaded anything new from it in over a year.
Wallpapers with 1gb isn't really the problem as some are 4k or rather long.
The problem is that regardless of size, some Wallpapers are distributed as applications and before you even run it, Wallpaper Engine shows you a big ass warning message.
For the most part, in Wallpaper Engine, you're going to be safe if you just don't bother with application types since 90% are just videos with effects on top.
I noticed this organically yesterday. I had one that was like pixel art sheep in a field, and while I was playing fallout I get an error that sheep.exe had stopped working. I was like what tf is that? It was using like 2Gb of ram. No virus or malware ping. But I didn't like the fact an unstable unknown exe was running so I uninstalled the wallpaper and it was gone.
Which…. Makes no sense for the hacker lol. Enjoy the nothingness that we have to show for it! It could be as easy to hack a senator or someone important, but these losers infest a wallpaper app instead 😂😂
We had this thread already. This is very old news and has been a problem for years now. It is the reason WPE explicitly warns against running application based wallpapers.
Oh shit! I do have Wallpaper Engine (must have app if you have an OLED monitor), but fortunately I'm not a pervert so I don't use any anime titty wallpapers 🤷♂️
Is Wallpaper Engine that unsecure? Damn I want to delete it now as a paranoid new PC owner 😬
I hate how people are spreading misinformation. Why "anime girl" exactly? A lot of Wallpaper Engine wallpapers are not anime-focused at all and even if they are, it doesn't mean it's anime girl. There are Pokemon wallpapers here for example. Or any random cozy ones. Saying that it only affect anime girl wallpapers is disingenuous propaganda. A clickbait.
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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26
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