I recently wanted to watch something a film and went to one of the first two sites listed on the Reddit’s r/Piracy mega thread under it’s online streaming section. I normally use an older laptop that I don’t care about and have no sensitive info on but wanted to stream to a projector and only my personal laptop had an hdmi port.
I downloaded firefox exclusively to use for piracy streaming but initially forgot to add ublock origin or another AV extension to the browser. When clicking anywhere on the site, a new tab would open that I’d need to close before I could actually engage with the website content (search, play, etc), which had been my experience in the past using online streaming sites. Once, one of the popup tabs opened and immediately started a file download without my permission. I didn’t open it and deleted it immediately but have recently been noticing some performance issues on my device Mostly that web pages and their content are slower to load than before and my computer has gotten overwhelmed and frozen a few times - not extremely substantially but enough that I’ve noticed a difference.
For context: I have a ThinkPad with windows 10 installed and an Intel i5 CPU. My default browser has been Opera for a few months now.
I just checked and the compressed zip file is in my recycling bin (not fully off my computer) and I’m not sure if/how it can affect my device without me ever opening or running its contents. I don’t have an antivirus background process on my device aside from the default Microsoft Defender Antivirus that comes with Windows 10.
Is there possibly somewhere I could upload the file to check for malware/scan the file to know what it does (titled “XVlDEOSs_Elena_Frost_IMG_223606” - searching for that title didn’t match anything on google)? Is there any chance the file is benign and the performance issues I’m noticing are unrelated to this situation?
TLDR: How concerned should I be about the possibility of a virus on my device from a popup window automatically downloading a zip file I never opened?
Would reinstalling my OS be the main/only possible resolution to a potential virus/worm/malware? I’d really like to avoid that if possible but many of the articles/info I can find about it have inconsistent info about risk and steps to take for resolution. I don’t know much about what kinds of risks I might’ve exposed my computer to. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Windows 10 isn’t getting security updates any more so there’s a chance you were affected by an exploit either that day or a different time.
Windows 10 is still getting security updates if you enrolled for extended security updates, which I believe my Windows machine prompted me to do (though it’s possible I only saw it when I went into update settings to manually update, rather than a desktop notification).
Thanks for the update, I’m kind i’m afraid to boot into Windows 10 on my dual boot machine, but luckily I haven’t needed to for anything.
Also, uBlock Origin isn’t an AV program. It blocks ads, which may be malicious… But malicious ads are only one potential vector for malware, and being blocked won’t necessarily stop drive-by attacks. Because of the way browser ad blockers work, the ad still has to load in the background before it can be blocked, so you’re still being served the potentially malicious ads. It probably would’ve helped in this scenario (where OP actually clicked a malicious ad) but there’s no telling what other BS they picked up just by browsing.