Amanogawa Shiina Returns With a Test Stream After Wiping Her PC Over Malware

PHASE CONNECT — Amanogawa Shiina of Phase Connect went live with a test stream after wiping her entire PC, which she said had been infected by malware tied to a compromised launcher for the mobile-and-PC game Goddess of Victory: Nikke.

Shiina said the malware reached players’ computers through the game’s launcher, not through any link she clicked. She said her antivirus found nothing, that she checked the Windows registry and found the payload had been activated, and that she tried deleting entries by hand and with PowerShell before deciding to wipe everything. She said she restored no old files and that her computer was now clean.

“I have 200 passwords to change by hand.” — Amanogawa Shiina, on why she wiped her PC

The cleanup took most of two days. She said she spent half of the previous day and most of the stream day changing about 200 passwords, moved from a Chrome-based password manager to a dedicated one, and set up passkeys and two-factor authentication where she could. She also moved from Chrome to Firefox mid-stream and rebuilt her OBS scenes, this time using hardware encoding. She tested her Super Chat alerts early in the stream, and they worked after a short scare.

She said the rebuilt setup made her mic sound cleaner, and chat noticed a change in her voice. Later she talked through her Super Chats, 29 of them, and gave an update on her hand-knitted scarf raffle: 40 winners had been contacted and the scarves shipped, and she plans to knit 50 to 60 next year.

Shiina said she has not reinstalled Nikke on her PC and may stream it from an iPad if she plays again. She left to attend an evening Japanese class, saying she is working toward the N2 exam, and said she would be back the next day with a game in which the player coaches a sister through driving.