u/OrangeChickenGato

Hey guys, I've been having the worst paranoia I've ever experienced in all of my life starting from last June.

I haven't been able to think straight for the past month as I'm extremely worried about my cybersecurity, so worried that I feel that 5 windows reinstall via usb wouldn't be enough to get rid of anything hidden. I don't even feel okay to login to any of my accounts with worry of being compromised and such.

I've used Windows Defender, Norton 360 For Gamers, HitmanPro, and Malwarebytes but none of those caught anything but still I can't get this feeling that somebody compromised my accounts and are in them or that I'm constantly being spied on while feeding them my sensitive information.

It (My thoughts) could be because I've been constantly reading about people's experiences with say Mr. Beast Infostealer, Lummastealer, Renpy Stealer, and all that just makes my situation worse when thinking about it.

I've changed my passwords numerous times after reading some people's experiences because I wouldn't want it to happen to me, and to think that the hacker could be logged in without you ever knowing since it shows your location just makes even me feel unsafe although I'm not affected, at least that I know.

If say I had an Infostealer or any sort of malware, which wouldn't be something I'm aware of until I find out (Never did anything for captchas as I've read it's dangerous) How do I completely get rid of it? Could it get into my motherboard or other system components? Because at this point I feel like the only way to feeling normal and being happy & carefree again would be to purchase a whole new PC.

I'm sorry to the mods for my unusual amount of posts made recently but I just feel so paranoid and don't know who to turn to, I just want to feel okay again.

Hello Reddit, so I've been trying to reinstall windows 11 from my usb but every time I do so it keeps crashing with these errors around the start of the installation and nearing 75-77%, also sometimes when I try to even install it by continuing through the options it just freezes up and reboots.

Stop Code: KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (0x1E)

Stop Code: BAD_POOL_CALLER (0xC2)

Stop Code: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (0x3B) (On it's own)

Stop Code: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (0x3B)
What failed: FLTMGR.SYS
What failed: Ntfs.sys (Different occurrence)

Stop Code: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (0xA)
What failed: ntoskrnl.exe

Stop Code: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (0x50)

Stop Code: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (0xD1)

And last but probably not least, I get some weird popup box about "Sign in process initialization failure" that says "Interactive sign-in process initialization has failed" "Please check the event log for details" But I don't even have windows 11 properly installed because of all these errors.

Please if anybody has any solutions please I need them.

I genuinely need professional help to help me look for malware in my computer because I see 2 logins for my microsoft account for microsoft edge and it shows that they used 2fa to sign in but it shows my location and IP address and I swear I was sleeping at the time. Also I recently just did a password change but it shows that it was changed yesterday at 11:17pm, but on the email it says 4:17pm today. (These aren't the only reasons I want to scan for malware, but if you'd like to know) 4 Command Prompts on startup once week, Antivirus turning off randomly when doing a quick scan, Potentially Unwanted Apps protection turning off shortly after, then seeing many events in event viewer that in the description indicated malware could be present if the setting had changed.

I feel so paranoid that I feel the need of getting support from professionals, I've heard about FRST and ESET scans with the support of a professional but I'm unsure what to do or how to start with that. I haven't been able to think straight for the past month as I've been worried about someone possibly spying on me/collecting data (like emails and passwords) without me ever knowing.

I've already done 2 pc resets via usb stick and wiping all partitions, one on the 17th of June and one on the 29th. but I feel this would do nothing to get rid of something complex that prevents me from even redownloading windows 11 at times since it constantly runs into errors.

At this point I'm kind of begging for help.

I'm wanting to know the correct/best way to completely nuke my SSD of everything as I feel I wasn't very healthy with my security in the past and also think that recently doing 2 USB PC resets recently didn't do the trick. (Cleared all partitions for the ssd which had 3 options to it, cleaned them all)

I want to get rid of any hidden malware, rootkits and bootkits that could still probably be in my ssd or anything that I'm not aware of, but don't know the proper steps.

If anyone could help it would be greatly appreciated 😁

EDIT: I have the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB if this info supports the post

EDIT 2: I just cleaned all partitions on my drive but for some reason the Format Partition thing is grayed out. Anyone have an answer to this?

Edit 3: Now my pc doesn't want to even complete the installation process, it keeps crashing at 75%. I need help if anyone specializes in this.

Do I have Malware or some form of rootkit?

Just to fill you guys in, I reinstalled my windows 11 from a usb stick just 3 days ago, I pressed delete partitions on all the drives for my ssd and booted with my usb drive.

So 2 days ago I was scanning my pc using Windows Defender and at some point around 3:25pm during the scan, I got a notification saying my antivirus turned off and that the "Threat service has stopped. Restart it now." And this genuinely scared me so I pressed the restart button and waited a bit but nothing happened and with worry I ended up restarting my computer and it fixed itself.

But one thing I noticed later was that I had previously turned something on in Reputation-based protection, but then later in the day after I got the threat service warning I got another warning saying that Reputation-based protection was off.

I ended up looking through event viewer yesterday morning and I see a LOAD of Microsoft Defender configuration changes when the crash happened but it seemed to be repeated events, still worries me a lot.

I did a deep scan and a custom scan for rootkits on Malwarebytes but 0 detections.

Also I did an offline scan and it stopped around 91%. Is that normal?

Could this all potentially be malware conflict?

This is what caused the crash:

Microsoft Defender Antivirus engine has been terminated due to an unexpected error.
Failure Type: Crash
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Resource: file://C:\\WINDOWS\\System32\\Tasks\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Printing\\EduPrintProv
Engine Code: 16422

So yesterday I was scanning my pc using Windows Defender and at some point around 3:25pm, I got a notification saying my antivirus turned off and that the "Threat service has stopped. Restart it now." And this genuinely scared me so I pressed restart and waited a bit but nothing happened so I ended restarting my computer and it fixed itself.

But one thing I noticed later on was that I had previously turned something on in Reputation-based protection, but then later in the day after I got the threat service warning I got another warning saying that Reputation-based protection was off.

I ended up looking through event viewer this morning and I see a LOAD of Microsoft Defender configuration changes when the crash happened.

Also I did an offline scan and it stopped around 91%. Is that normal?

Could this potentially be malware conflict?

This is what caused the crash

Microsoft Defender Antivirus engine has been terminated due to an unexpected error.
Failure Type: Crash
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Resource: file://C:\WINDOWS\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\Printing\EduPrintProv
Engine Code: 16422

(I had barely reinstalled my windows 11 the day before via usb stick)

I really want to get to the bottom of this random occurrence that's happening to my pc and figure out what's really running.

So last night I decided for some peace of mind to completely nuke my pc because I constantly think about these 4 command prompt boxes opening every week on a random day, could be twice a week at that. And I thought to myself resetting it and deleting all partitions would fix it.

But this morning I saw the 4 command boxes appear again but all I had was firefox on my computer at the time. At first I thought OneDrive was the culprit for this so I stopped thinking about it (Even thought I uninstalled it from installed apps), but seeing it appear after the pc reset had me wondering.

Could this be an Intel thing? I really want to figure out what this even is, I hear others talk about it being normal for driver updates and such but I'm pretty paranoid so I'd like to figure out exactly what it is for some peace of mind.

I have an Intel CPU and an NVIDIA GPU if that info helps.

So this has occurred to me 3 times now on 3 random days and I thought I figured out what the culprit would be which I thought was OneDrive's auto updater but I'm completely unsure now as it showed Microsoft OneDrive in the control panel installed today but that was before I saw the 4+ Command Prompts appearing on my pc.

Everyday for past 10 or so days I've been recording my pc on each startup trying to catch these command prompts that appear on startup but have failed every time.

I'm genuinely worried that this could be something malicious, but I have almost everything disabled in startup, hardly anything installed on my pc apart from firefox, discord, spotify, nvidia broadcast and some steam games actually from steam.

If anyone can follow up with their experiences or solutions I'd gladly appreciate it.

EDIT: I ended up flashing my pc with a new windows 11 and it still popped up with the 4 command prompts, so I think it's normal driver updates or at least I hope. (Cleaned all partitions on each drive from my ssd)

Does anyone know what this could be?

Yesterday upon logging in I saw a service running on my pc and it said Work or school account (2), then shortly after it changed to Microsoft account (2). But now today it's showing "Out of Box Experience (2)" and I'm completely worried that it might mean something bad. Does this indicated that someones in my machine? Or am I just being paranoid over nothing?

Edit: Just to give more info, I installed a fresh windows 11 on the 17th and I had to bypass the login screen due to no wifi/ethernet. So I made a local account but then later on i signed into my account.

Could this be why I'm seeing this?

Has anyone been experiencing any stutters in fps recently?

Every game I've played recently has given me micro stutters. Even in a private server on catalog avatar creator.

I have moments where my fps tanks from 240 to less than 100 and instantly go back, may be for a split second but it's still a big issue.

So I went on my computer this morning expecting 4-5 command prompts to suddenly open as it happened 3-4 days ago after reinstalling a new windows 11 on a Wednesday, I have been recording each startup to try and catch it when it appears but there has been no luck.

Today it happened again after my 2nd reboot, unfortunately I wasn't recording as I thought it would never happen again. I'm just wondering if this happens to anyone too?

I read somewhere that drivers try to reinstall itself on a Tuesday but I'm unsure if this is true and would like to know if there's some way to see recent activities happening in command prompt.

It just makes me very worried that this could potentially be a virus. I thought it was Norton doing it's usual updates but ever since I've removed it I'm not sure what could be causing it to appear.

This does seem to only happen once on boot and never reappears again until some random day.

So I'm here trying to scroll through YouTube Shorts and every few videos (sometimes even one) always ends up freezing everything on my Firefox until I minimize and bring it back and only then it unfreezes. Is there a permanent solution to this? Only extension I have downloaded is Ublock Origin.

I've been reading about Norton and how they use many resources and is bloatware in general and I would like to know the proper way to uninstall it for good as I hear the Norton uninstaller doesn't fully clean everything up and reinstalls itself.

Is it normal for my computer to be using 10GB of ram constantly in the background? I have 32GB of DDR5 Ram and it shows at least 10000MB of memory being used in resource manager but I see nothing that would add up to that much in task manager. Could anyone help?

Hello, so this morning I turned my pc on to see 4-5 CMD Prompts open and close pretty quickly and I'm on a fresh install of windows 11. Could this still possibly be malware? I get pretty paranoid and just want to be certain that this isn't a virus or anything.

Hello, so this morning I turned my pc on to see 4-5 CMD Prompts open and close pretty quickly and I'm on a fresh install of windows 11. Could this still possibly be malware? I get pretty paranoid and just want to be certain that this isn't a virus or anything.