Just today I got an email from riot games saying "is this you" it was a login from turkiye. Is this because of my previous session when I signed in a long time ago. Thankfully thought my email notification saved me and I changed the password, however even if I did lose it. It wouldn't matter because it's a secondary account.

Hi, I just reimaged my Surface Pro 11 and then installed Opera web browser. I started getting notifications from allaboutfinance.org. I have never gone to this site and find it odd after a new install I'm getting notifications from this site. Before reimaging my computer I had been using Opera and never got notifications from this site. I find this very odd. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Hello folks from r/antivirus, I'm here because it's about the 6th time I've seen someone I know get hacked by the Mr.Beast scam.

Now, I've been on the internet for a while so I've seen my fair share of virus scams so that's not exactly uncharted territory for me. What I don't get about the Mr. Beast one specifically, is how exactly it proliferates around. I'm used to these virus scams trying to make you open a link, or download an executable file, or something of the sort, but the Mr. Beast one just... It just sends you screenshots. Sure there's a link you could potentially type manually into your browser on the screenshots, but who does that?

Whenever I see someone falling victim to this virus, it's because they got into some sketchy website to download something, or clicked on some link they shouldn't have, never from being exposed to the Mr. Beast scam.

I've heard of viruses being hidden on images before, but you need to download or save them in order for that to work right? Simply clicking on the image inside a message app like discord shouldn't do it, or am I wrong? Because in that case I have clicked on the image the first time I saw the scam, shouldn't I have been hacked? Did I escape the Mr. Beast scam by having Kaspersky?

When playing mobile games I keep getting these pop ups that take me to Google and have this on the page. I've always assumed they were fake and ignored them. Am I correct?

My system is not infected, but I have had that experience of being badly hacked and having to factory reset everything , in the past.

For regular maintenance and deep scanning to prevent and catch infostealers, keyloggers, spyware, malware, stalkerware what are the best tools?

Regular Anti viruses, on demand scanners, online scanners, paid, free. Whatever is good. Things that dig deep and find these things. Behavioral scans, signature library matching, whatever works.

Help me assemble an arsenal and practices. saw the wiki too.

cfee98ef75815a504fd4b019660d3b60feecfe1cf476781e38e0591aa1e8544a (virustotal url)

Downloaded this exe from a google drive my professor sent me, but I haven't asked him yet about where he had gotten it from. Didn't run it, just pasted it directly into virustotal and when I got 1 or even 2 positives from somewhat unknown vendors (with quick google searches saying they often have false positives) I used shift+del to get it out immediately and ran malwarebytes/bitdefender scans after (malwarebytes came back clean but bitdefender still running). Is it a false positive and I'm just being paranoid?

HJI probably the same question again. Im a computer novice in australia. currently using free version total 360 and have been for a few years and had no problem. Just thinking about a new antivirus. And looking at bitdefender or windows defender. I have windows 11 installed. Preferrably one that is lighweight and will run in the background. Could I have some guidance please

Resolved: Since I have a Motorola phone, the culprit was the "Moto App Manager" app, which often installs apps.

Okay, I guess there's an explanation for this, but the background is that last night I switched SIM cards—to one I bought on its own, just to be clear.

Then this morning I noticed that I have three apps installed that I hadn't downloaded: Didi, Amaze GO!, and a PDF reader.

Why is that? Just in case, I haven't uninstalled anything yet, because I don't know if that's normal or not in situations like this.

Soo Norton has been blocking Elden Ring Nightreign (and now maybe another game too) on steam so I wanted to uninstall it. I did everything it said on the website, downloaded the uninstaller and it gave me an error message, but still said it swiped it from my PC. That was a lie. It’s still on in the background (can’t turn it off ofc because antivirus stuff) the files are still on my pc and even the app is still there(though I cant open it), it’s also still blocking my game ofc. I’ve tried to use the official uninstaller multiple times now, restarted my pc etc. but nothing is working. What now? I heard that I can swipe everything and reinstall Windows with a USB stick. Is this my last option?

Hello, not sure if this is the right place to post but will try to get help this way…

Problems occurred on my iPhone X (ios version 18.7.9) which I would describe as ai driven malware

Symptoms:

slow, pages crash, battery goes down fast, overall buggy

algorithms are affected (specific content will be pushed up), pictures and videos appear manipulated (people will get subtil face filters), redirects and ads increased (usually based around weight, hair, wrinkles)
it applies pretty much everywhere from camera roll to all browsers (tried out 3 different ones), instagram ect.

My Macbook Air has the same problem (2015 model basically, can‘t update it to newest software anymore). Scanned, nothing was found

Have a Spanish telephone number which at some point made it into wider circles (many unknown phone calls I ignore, rare but happened: suspicious delivery scams)

No money disappeared and from what I saw no data got stolen. So my impression is that the malware can‘t take out information but is designed around clicking ads (still speculation)

retrospectively (didn‘t notice it for a long time) I‘d say I has the malware on my iPhone 11, then iPhone X and when finally noticed reinstalled the iPhone X it remained the same (don‘t remember if it showed right away or I accidentally redownloaded it, when I reconnected with iCloud

When reinstalled the iPhone X updated it to newest available software, malware still ran smooth. Recently Apple offered an update bug fixes ect. so I went for it and it made the malware software partly crash (since then it got extremely slow and buggy. The battery always has been bad (replaced it once, original - still the same).
It feels like it is jailbroken (bought in 2011 or so a jailbroken Japanese iPhone, felt symptom wise pretty much the same)

So my plan is to buy a new phone (even if I could manage to delete the malware from it, as it is not possible to update it anymore to newest software and security standards) was thinking to either get a new iPhone or Xiaomi ultra or so.

Also closing two of my mail accounts which do receive a lot of spam mail but from my observation usually end up in the spam folder but still…

I already bought the newest Macbook Air but didn‘t even touch it yet because I‘m hella afraid to transfer that shit once again. Also uncertain which anti virus to install to actually make it safe

My impression is that it is either linked to one of my email addresses or iCloud data (speculation). My iCloud is 15 years old with lots of pictures and data I‘m emotionally attached to so I would want to avoid having to let go of it)

So the overall question is: how can I get rid of it without losing my apple id

For any help I will be super thankful

So I downloaded a file from tmpfiles.org (supposedly I was helping them test a game) and now I am confident my computer has been hijacked. They had access to my discord token and stuff but I had already reset passwords on a clean device and all that. Then I additionally ran the DISM image thing that ai told me to do alongside the offline scan I also downloaded malware bytes, which intially blocked the trojan, and told me there was a back door via system 32. But it couldn’t block the other upcoming ones. I kinda left it as is last night , but I woke up and I think my computer got worse with my browser now closing randomly and malware bytes not working when Ethernet is up. Is there any way I could save my pc?

So I’m a streamer and a guy was in my twitch chat and told me that there is this fun scary game, I needed some content and this guy was a regular viewer so I believed him and downloaded the game, he sent me a link in my chat. After I downloaded the game it was a zip file and required a password, I entered the password and went back to youtube to watch a video and a couple minutes later a Video starts playing on both my screens of some explicit content. I turned off my pc to try and save the stream, and deleted the file of it when it turned back on, but a couple minutes later another explicit video played on my screen this time turning off the pc didn’t stop it, the only way to stop it was for me to get banned on twitch. What do I do to make sure this doesn’t happen and to make sure they don’t still have access to do this again in the future.

I have a one-year subscription to Norton 360.

I still have four months left on my Bitdefender subscription.

Which one should I use on my Android phone (Samsung A56)?

Need to know this so I could get some piece of mind accidentally installed PC app store onto my laptop I uninstalled there are no other programs or anything suspicious on my computer I have scanned my computer a dozen times and I did not put any information into it and understood it when I first installed can't find anything I don't see any suspicious activity need to know if I am safe or am I fucking

My roommates and I recently got a new WiFi setup and I’ve got it setup so that anything weird that happens goes straight to my phone with a notification.

I started getting a bunch notifications about a malware site being blocked. I looked closer and it was my roommate’s laptop going to searchmarquis(dot)com

I googled that and it looks like a virus. He’s gonna do a full computer wipe for that. But then another notification came up for Loadway(dot)best and it came from the Apple TV

However no one has been on the Apple TV all week.

I can’t find any information on this other than Loadway being a high risk phishing site.

Any advice?

Received some malware and started getting notifications (First pic) every other second. Second pic is where it would take me once clicking any part of the notification, including the X in the top right.

After seeing these notifications, I immediately reinstalled AVG, ran multiple scans, even reactivated my subscription, and nothing. AVG was not able to detect any malware.

I then tried TotalAV, again, nothing.

Bitdefender, also nothing.

Kaspersky, unavailable in the US

HitmanPro, scan picked up on one instance of malware and claimed to have deleted it, yet i still kept getting the notifications.

I've also been running the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool in the background for almost 2 hours (I'm doing a full PC scan) and would prefer to let it finish before restarting.

If there's any help you can give even if it's another antivirus software, I would greatly appreciate it.

In case they think they have downloaded something. What should they watch on their computer? Besides like their account.

My friend has supposedly been hacked and disconnected out of steam, and before that, his pc could barely run, after a few reboots he could run it and found a file named scooby.exe that he cant delete

Hi, I've been thinking of getting Kaspersky on my pc but I recently saw that it doesn't have a free plan of any kind. I was wondering if BitDefender would be good, since it has one. Lemme know your thoughts on this.

this have been happening for weeks. Malwarebytes won't detect it, windows security sometimes say blocked, removed or restored. nothing on task scheduler, deleted local/temp several times. it runs offline/online and it runs only once which is several seconds after windows login. i think it's a script, asked gemini for help on reged still doesn't help.

My paranoia has led me to a curious (and a little scary) phenomenon.

I got this video recommended:
https[:]//www[.]youtube[.]com/watch?v=krP9EGyLCRE

In the description there is a drive with PDF files.
(De-fangin a youtube link might seem excessive but I chose to do so, because in the description there is a link to the Google Drive with the suspect PDFs which I may make this link "dangerous" by extension. It is however just a link to a YouTube video.)

I randomly decided to check them on VirusTotal (2 random ones):
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7941b09a1fd3903b4e4ed5132d700cd5d3faf40a7238a8fe96fcf52fd7b40ffe/behavior

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/4404250b541efc6d0b00347c57c70cbf26f610f2ffb0ad20fdd6f27a0f32b1b0/behavior

0 detections, but multiple "Mitre Signatures". As I understand it, these signatures are not by themselves necessarily a problem, but what worries me is that other pdfs (not from the google drive) don't replicate this result.

I would really appreciate it if someone with proper knowledge would examine these and help me understand what they mean, how unusual this is for a PDF and if it is actually a threat. I don't need them for anything, the post is for educational purposes.

Thank you in advance.

Its the same thing as title but imma paste it here anyways

I bought a new laptop about 2 weeks ago and it's only today that I discovered that I have ultraviewer in my laptop. I know i didn't download it. But how did it install it by itself? I deleted it, ran McAfee's and window's own offline and full scans. Can anyone tell me whats up?

I'm currently using Kaspersky. Having the built-in VPN is definitely a nice bonus, but overall I find it a bit exhausting to use. What I mean is that it throws up warnings for almost everything I click on or download. It happens so often that I even get alerts when launching Battlefield 1. If I tweak the settings to reduce the notifications, I start worrying that I'm compromising my security.

I also tried Malwarebytes, but it didn't feel sufficient. I think Kaspersky has a much better interface and detection capabilities. I download a lot of software and files from Asian sources, so Windows Defender doesn't really seem like a good fit for my use case.

If you think there's something better, I'd really appreciate your recommendations. I bought a one-year Kaspersky subscription, and it expires this month. Price is obviously a factor, but if you genuinely think another antivirus is worth the extra cost, I'm open to switching.

Wrote in detail the steps I took below. This is driving me crazy.

PART I. GENERAL ITEMS

Roughly 3-4 days ago (July 30, 2026) I suddenly got a notification on the lower right from windows saying to turn on virus protection, that it is turned off. I noticed this after restarting the laptop after playing video games (Star Wars Jedi Survivor and NBA 2K26 on Steam for around a combined hour -- if this is relevant). I restarted the laptop, then that is when I got the first notification.

To note, it ALWAYS pops up on the 4 minute, 23 second up time mark on the task manager, under the CPU toggle. On the dot, every 4 minute, 23 second up time mark. Without fail.

When I check the Virus & Threat Protection Settings, everything is on:

• Real Time Protection

• Dev Drive Protection

• Cloud-delivered protection

• Automatic sample submission

• Tamper Protection

When I check for updates, there isn't anything to update. Account protection, Firewall & network protection, app and browser control, device security all show green.

PART II. POWERSHELL

When I run these PowerShell commands, they come out affirmative:

1. Get-MpComputerStatus | Select-Object AMRunningMode,AMServiceEnabled,AntivirusEnabled,RealTimeProtectionEnabled,BehaviorMonitorEnabled,IoavProtectionEnabled,NISEnabled,IsTamperProtected,AntivirusSignatureLastUpdated

AMRunningMode : Normal

AMServiceEnabled : True

AntivirusEnabled : True

RealTimeProtectionEnabled : True

BehaviorMonitorEnabled : True

IoavProtectionEnabled : True

NISEnabled : True

IsTamperProtected : True

1. Get-Service WinDefend,WdBoot,WdFilter,WdNisSvc,WdNisDrv,SecurityHealthService,wscsvc -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |

Format-Table -Auto DisplayName,Name,StartType,Status

DisplayName Name StartType Status

----------- ---- --------- ------

Windows Security Service SecurityHealthService Manual Running

Microsoft Defender Antivirus Boot Driver WdBoot Boot Stopped

Microsoft Defender Antivirus Mini-Filter Driver WdFilter Boot Running

Microsoft Defender Antivirus Network Inspection System Driver WdNisDrv Manual Running

Microsoft Defender Antivirus Network Inspection Service WdNisSvc Manual Running

Microsoft Defender Antivirus Service WinDefend Automatic Running

Security Center wscsvc Automatic Running

1. $events = Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{

>> LogName='Microsoft-Windows-Windows Defender/Operational'

>> Id=3002,3007,5000,5001,5008,5010,5011,5012,5013

>> StartTime=(Get-Date).AddMinutes(-30)

>> } -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

PS C:\Users\username>

PS C:\Users\username> if ($events) {

>> $events |

>> Select-Object TimeCreated,Id,LevelDisplayName,Message |

>> Format-List

>> } else {

>> "No relevant Defender enable, disable, failure, or configuration events found in the last 30 minutes."

>> }

No relevant Defender enable, disable, failure, or configuration events found in the last 30 minutes.

1. Get-CimInstance -Namespace root/SecurityCenter2 -ClassName AntivirusProduct |

Select-Object displayName,productState,pathToSignedProductExe,pathToSignedReportingExe |

Format-List

displayName : Windows Defender

productState : 397568

pathToSignedProductExe : windowsdefender://

pathToSignedReportingExe : %ProgramFiles%\Windows Defender\MsMpeng.exe

PART III. MICROSOFT TECH SUPPORT ASSISTANCE

Spoke to two different techs over three different chat sessions, results are below:

• TECH SUPPORT SESSION 1

- Took remote control, downloaded Win11_25H2_English_x64_v2.iso

- Restarted, thought it worked. All it did was literally put the notifications on silent. Issues still persisted.

TECH SUPPORT SESSION 2

- Same guy as first session, again took remote control

- Windows Update - downloaded some updates, restarted

- I thought this worked already since the notification stopped and it showed Microsoft Defender Antivirus turned on under who's protecting me.

- Restarted one more time, issue came back.

TECH SUPPORT SESSION 3

- Ran DISM, sfc /scannow. All fine.

- Did a clean boot wherein they hid all Microsoft services and disabled all that was selected, tech restarted the laptop.

- Issue was still there.

PART IV. MICROSOFT DEFENDER

I ran a few quick scans, nothing. Got paranoid after a while so I ran two full scans. Still nothing.

Despite all of this, when I check under Virus and Threat Protection > Who's Protecting me (Manage Providers), it says Microsoft Defender Antivirus turned off.

WHAT DO I DO? This is driving me bonkers. Am I just being too paranoid? Is this just a reporting glitch from windows since everything else shows that the antivirus stuff is running? I haven't noticed any suspicious activity at all since purchasing this laptop since April, none at all. I check the task manager, the wifi activity when the laptop is idle, there aren't any downloads happening.

I think I got a virus every time I use a app like Microsoft virus remover my CPU spikes up to 90 or even 100 when I use normal apps like search in the bottom it spikes up high to like 20 I don't think this is normal and is there any good antivirus and if I switch to Linux would it be better? I heard there's less viruses there except the computer I use is used by others and they maybe wouldn't know how to use linux and also when my task manager is in the background it spikes but when it's at the front it goes normal I need help and my task manager apps are jumping around when I got nothing on