F
ForeverThoughtful
Hi and thanks in advance for taking the time to check my post out! Just on a sidenote, I sort of... leapt into dealing with this problem on my own. I searched as much as possible and did things to the best of my ability.
So a few days ago I noticed a random black box popping up for a few seconds every now and then on my screen. Upon further investigation, I realized it was an empty Command Prompt box. I quickly started searching for what this might be and determined that it was most likely some sort of spyware/malware or something along the lines of that. I'd assumed the culprit might've been a torrent file I stupidly downloaded. I honestly didn't quite know what it was at the time so when I just saw the file sitting there I deleted it.
So here's what I did:
So, yesterday I used my laptop all day practically nonstop up until late at night. I never once saw the empty command prompt thing pop up again.
HOWEVER, this morning I turned on my laptop as usual and as I was about to click on google chrome I saw something pop up for a moment... Now, it was faster than what I was seeing before, so I couldn't say for sure what it was. It looked a little smaller, seemed black/blank and only popped up once so far (its been about 3 hours since). I guessed it might have just been something to do with updates or whatever, but I don't want to just dismiss this either... I restarted my laptop a couple times and waited to see if it would happen again and it didn't.
So I went on to repeat step 1 and nothing came up..
Ultimately, I just want to know if this is likely nothing or if I already did enough before and am panicking pointlessly...
Am I safe and just freaking out for no reason..?
Any suggestions, tips, feedback, or whatever else is extremely appreciated and thank you for making it through my post!
Continue reading...
So a few days ago I noticed a random black box popping up for a few seconds every now and then on my screen. Upon further investigation, I realized it was an empty Command Prompt box. I quickly started searching for what this might be and determined that it was most likely some sort of spyware/malware or something along the lines of that. I'd assumed the culprit might've been a torrent file I stupidly downloaded. I honestly didn't quite know what it was at the time so when I just saw the file sitting there I deleted it.
So here's what I did:
- I had AVG scan my sd card and laptop several times and as thoroughly as possible. Sure enough, nothing came up.
- So then I downloaded Malwarebytes and had it scan my laptop. Several PUP's came up and so I took care of that as well. Then I had it scan my sd card as well and it seemed alright.
- I rescanned my system a few more times and did a factory reset.
- After the factory reset I used the built in option thing to create a recovery partition on my usb just in case. My windows 8.1 laptop didn't come with a cd.
- Once I did that restarted my laptop and pressed f11 to open the other... menu thing (I forgot what its called, sorry).
- From there I opened up command prompt and put in diskpart. I supposedly was able to clean/format/delete my volumes/partitions/disk. So when I had it list volumes it said there were none. Then I had it list partitions and it said "there are no partitions on this disk to show". And I'd successfully cleaned my disk. Ultimately I thought it was a mission success.
- After that I inserted my usb and had it factory reset. I chose the option to "repartition" instead of... I think it said "using the old ones" or something like that.
- So once all that was done, I reinstalled Malwarebytes and AVG and basically repeated steps 1 and 2. Nothing came up.
- I was still paranoid, so I went on to continue steps 3,5,6,7.
- After all of that, I reinstalled Malwarebytes and AVG just to have them scan all of my stuff again and it seemed like all was well.
So, yesterday I used my laptop all day practically nonstop up until late at night. I never once saw the empty command prompt thing pop up again.
HOWEVER, this morning I turned on my laptop as usual and as I was about to click on google chrome I saw something pop up for a moment... Now, it was faster than what I was seeing before, so I couldn't say for sure what it was. It looked a little smaller, seemed black/blank and only popped up once so far (its been about 3 hours since). I guessed it might have just been something to do with updates or whatever, but I don't want to just dismiss this either... I restarted my laptop a couple times and waited to see if it would happen again and it didn't.
So I went on to repeat step 1 and nothing came up..
Ultimately, I just want to know if this is likely nothing or if I already did enough before and am panicking pointlessly...
Am I safe and just freaking out for no reason..?
Any suggestions, tips, feedback, or whatever else is extremely appreciated and thank you for making it through my post!
Continue reading...