r/antivirus

Straight to the point, what do I do?

My email was hacked before, I changed the password. Then my insta, I changed it. And now my FB.

Please tell me what to do.

I downloaded a sketchy file and paid a price. Two days ago all my accounts got compromised. I managed to return almost all of them. That day I have ran Windows Defender deep scan and found a few trojans that were removed immediately. Yesterday, I also bought a new sdd and installed Windowd anew. After that it seemed fine.

Fast forward this afternoon I get notifications that someone is again attempting to login into my accounts.

So is there any chance that there is a rootkit on my MB or somewhere else? I have disconnected my PC, signed out of everything everywhere through the phone and also flashed the BIOS.

Any advice on what else I could do?

I will format all my disks if needed but i would prefer that as last resort

(context: i am sort of tech illiterate but a cautious individual. ive always been wary of viruses and stuff so i genuinely have no clue how this happened to me. i avoid clicking shady links, i dont download random stuff, and im just really cautious when it comes to stuff online. maybe i DID mess up one time and thats what led to this happening but i dont really know. please keep this in mind and dont harass me in the comments im already sorta going through it 🥀)

i was watching youtube (making ZERO contact with my trackpad or my mouse) when suddenly my cursor started going crazy?? it started moving around randomly on the screen. i panicked and unplugged my mouse usb to see if there was an issue with that, but my cursor was still moving around. its movements were random but they werent super erratic and jittery and buggy in a way that would make you think of it as just dust in your trackpad or something. it was clicking random stuff, zooming in, switching tabs, opening other windows i had, etc etc. idk if it did this on its own because at this point i was fighting for control using my trackpad so maybe it was our combined effort doing this. but regardless it was super suspicious!

eventually i won the control for my cursor because while it was actively fighting against my cursor i somehow managed to click the "shut down" option on my pc. by this point i was panicking super hard so i just stared at my screen kinda dumfounded before looking for tech advice on my phone. after 30 minutes i got the guts to turn on my pc again. i signed into my account, and then immediately went over to turn my wifi off. also when i booted up my computer again my cursor was perfectly fine... maybe the guy(?) controlling it calmed down or something during the 30 minutes i had my computer off. after turning off my wifi, i did a windows defender offline scan.

for some reason before the offline scan it asked me for my bitlocker key???? ive done numerous offline scans before (the last one being a month back) and this has NEVER happened to me. i searched up why i suddenly got this screen and google told me its because of a change in my hardware/pc (!!!!!) which immediately made me panic more. i put in my bitlocker key and then the offline scan happened.

maybe like 10 minutes later my computer turned on again and it said it didnt find anything weird, but it said that my memory integrity was off and that my device might be vulnerable. i dont remember having ANY device vulnerabilities the last time i did a virus scan? i did another really thorough 1 hour scan and it said my device was fine as well except for this one thing. i checked why i couldnt turn memory integrity on (because that was what showed up when i clicked on it) and i had a malfunctioning driver called ftdibus.sys. apparently it was made in 2014 but i downloaded it a year back. its called oem146.inf. i dont know what any of that means.

i was still super suspicious so i tried to do another offline scan and when it asked for my bitlocker key again, i tried to open the key website on my phone but now microsoft says that it cant sign me in right now???? i thought that was weird because it was working fine just minutes ago so i exited the screen and pulled up the website again. it reloaded like 7 times attempting to sign me in only for the "try again. we cant sign you in right now." screen to show up again. i was actually losing my mind after seeing this i went and added 2fa to my microsoft account. my computer still has the screen where i need to type in my bitlocker key literally at this moment but i cant access my key because microsoft keeps saying it cant sign me in.

prior to this starting like a few months back ive been getting multiple black exe(?) windows popping up in quick succession on my screen, before disappearing as quickly as they first appeared. this happens sometimes when i turn on my pc, or unpredictably when im using it. i thought this was a weird thing thats been happening since switching over to windows 11 but it happens EVERY time i use my computer so maybe thats not quite right. ive noticed my computer sound like its on deaths door too like out of nowhere the fans start going crazy but maybe thats a sign i need to clean it. anyway what im saying is that theres been signs pointing to malware for a while but i brushed them off because of just how absurd the possibility was. up until this incident.

as of now my computers waiting for me to put my bitlocker key, and its still not connected to the internet. what should i do? i dont think it was a bug with my mouse/cursor stuff because HOW could it independently move around AND click/open random stuff. im open to any other theories! just praying its not malware.

i dont want to like purge my computer because the last time i checked, my onedrive was hella full along with my primary gmail. i wasnt getting any emails on the gmail account i had everything saved to (also the gmail i used to set up this computer). i havent been getting emails for months and i have probably hundreds of files not backed up to my onedrive. also i save like all my files to a folder on my desktop so idk if the stuff i have stored ONLY on my desktop is vulnerable. it probably is. i dont want to factory reset my pc and lose all of this...

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idk if its unrelated but because my computers busted i tried to do homework on my phone but i couldnt open a specific document (which i could open in the past!!!) it displayed this message:

"Something went wrong, and we are restoring the contents of your document from Drive. Some offline edits may have been lost."

and when i tried again it showed this message:

"Check your Internet connection, and make sure you have permission to open the document, then try again."

maybe im just being paranoid because of what happened. id appreciate if anyone could answer this ultra specific question too though.

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any advice, any answers to ANYTHING ive said would help tremendously. as of now i cant do my homework or study for my test which is in like 5 hours. its 4 in the morning and i havent studied or finished anything yet.

also my computers a dell g3 3500 i believe. im already a really paranoid person so you can probably see how this is affecting me. also i dont really trust myself with tech stuff so i might just go to like an IT support place somewhere near me.

i was downloading a movie from telegram (assumed it was safe since i've used only a few times before and never had issues) so i was careless and downloaded a .scr file. i didnt open it, as soon as the download was complete, windows defender sent a notification saying the file was detected to be trojan and the file was quarantined.

i panicked and removed the file, ran a windows defender scan again and it was clear, the history also said threat was removed. i checked my downloads, task manager for unnecessary usage, found nothing, so i switched off the wifi and shut the laptop off just in case. im just really worried since this is the first time its happening. what else should i do? please help thank you

Hello!

I was looking for a Minecraft of all things for my kid, and suddenly I get popups saying "Critical Error", "Virus Found" etc. However, clicking the X on a couple of them just created tabs on my browser for McAfee etc. The url's for the web addresses both on the alerts and on the pages that opened (I stopped clicking as soon as I noticed what happened) do not look legit at all.

How do I get rid of this?

While doing some work for my class, everything froze for a bit and became very slow. I tried to open task manager with ctrl+shift+esc and nothing happened. I thought maybe Windows just needed to update since I've pushed it off for a while. After I updated Windows, I still couldn't open Task Manager and even got denied access while trying to open it by Win+R. And then I noticed in the power options, I could only lock the screen. The options to power off, restart, and sign out were gone. I did run an offline scan with Windows Defender and Malwarebytes and both came back with nothing. I did manage to regain access to Task Manager and my power options with the Local Group Policy Editor and Registry Editor, but I'm still worried about it.