English:

Is it normal that there are fake websites with viruses similar to itch.io?

I was just looking for a website to download a game not long ago, and, as usual, I didn’t check the URL and almost messed up because there was a virus that added itself to the exceptions so that the antivirus wouldn’t check it.

русский:

это нормально что существуют фейковый сайты с вирусами похожее на itch.io?

просто я не давно искал сайт где скачать игру и как обычно не посмотрел на URL и чуть не профукался так как там вирус который добавлял себя в исключения чтобы антивирус его не проверял

Is it normal that there are fake websites with viruses

Welcome to the Internet.

Trust no one, just because they exist or have a website or host something on a website or have written something on a website. If you can do it, so can criminals.

And creating a fake site  or uploading malicous things is trivial. Not so trivial is creating a fake domain. You can complain to the service provider that hosts the fake domain. But be careful to actually complain to the underlying provider and not to the criminals.

For malicous things hosted on a legit platform, you can complain to the platform.

So yeah, unfortunately, it is common to see fake websites. Anything that people visit a lot is an attractive thing to fake.

For Itch there is another problem. There are scraper platforms. They copy the Itch catalogue right down to downloadable files. The scam might be software piracy or distributing malware. And funnily enough, I once found actual malware on Itch that was still indexed on such a scraper site.

Anyway, there is actual fake games with viruses in it hosted on the real Itch. Trust no one just because they exist on a website ;-)

Sadly yes, popular sites get copied a lot, so the safest habit is to bookmark itch.io and open games from there instead of from search results. You said you almost got caught, but if you did run anything from that site, it's worth checking that it didn't leave something behind. On Windows, open Windows Security, go to Virus & threat protection, then Manage settings, and under Exclusions click Add or remove exclusions. Remove anything there that you didn't add yourself.

After that, run a Microsoft Defender Offline scan from Scan options, since it restarts the PC and scans before Windows fully loads. If you typed any passwords while that program was on your PC, changing them from another device is a good idea too. Glad you noticed before it got worse.