Call it poor judgement. Call it another misadventure on the internet. But last night, I was looking for a .apk file for my phone. I thought I found it, but when I went to download it, instead of the file, it was a .exe file. It could be an installer, I thought, so I downloaded it. My first mistake. Then I ran it, and it downloaded another file. And ran it without my consent. Then Windows Defender started going off about detecting malware. And that was when I had the Oh Shit moment. Immediately it downloaded and installed all sorts of crap and set it to automatically run. And then it deleted all of my browser shortcut and replaced them with modified ones that would go through the malware, not the browsers. Of course I immediately tried to clean it up. Windows Defender caught the torjan horse and deleted it. And I found the hidden shortcuts, and replaced the borgus shortcuts with them. But it still had changed my startup home page, and I couldn't get a reset to stick. So I did the only thing I recommend when you have a virus: nuke the system. So now I have to start over from scratch, with a backup that's over a month old.
But there is no virus that can survive the format c: command.....
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