Edit: Folks, I keep telling you it’s VERY unlikely to be malware.
I’ll update you and apologize to each if my credit card gets wiped or something but I’m quite sure I’m safe, don’t worry.
Also sorry for blaming Microsoft for what is apparently my fault.
I accidentally clicked Microsoft Edge on my work computer with Windows 10 and couldn’t close it — it just keeps reopening. It takes File Shredder to stop it from opening again, at least until the computer restarts.
Notice the ads, most are extremely sketchy (my frequent reload in previous takes caused the ad server + my work VPN to rate limit me):
- China warns:
%user.currency%is dead! (Yeah, sure. Obvious propaganda. Generic pictures or faked images of a worthless banknote giveaway.) - 63-year-old figured out! (Does not say what but a pic of obviously young-looking feet.)
- Make boatloads of money with AI! (aka auto-trade very uncompetitive options, no guarantees on withdrawals of any wins)
- Save money using solar! (The company is legitimate but the deal on panels is probably not great)
- Buy yourself a great new FPCEILPTBSP! (You can’t tell what it is and neither can we! (Apparently TV wall mount))
- Losing hair?
- Millionaire has genius method you can try (but give us money first, making his pic transparent so we can put him in front of
%user.country.flag%was difficult) - Game! Yay! (Microtransactions galore!)
- Get EVERYTHING in your car fixed (by a stock photo mechanic!)
Infected by Microsoft.
Basically no modern malware will ever do this, lol. Every black hat just wants to make money by pushing ads, holding data ransom or stealing passwords, as stealthily as possible. Users are already suffficiently anmoyed by corpos, freeware software vendors and other users sharing the same network, the era of purely mildly annoying malware ended in the 2000s. There is no executable I haven’t checked with VirusTotal, and most are FOSS. Firefox once did something similar on me (infinite blank tabs) but it turned out I had misconfigured it to try to call itself to open PDFs.
Microsoft didn’t create your issue, you did by trying to delete an essential part of the OS. Try deleting essential files in Linux and see how well that goes!
I guess you would blame Microsoft too.
Joke’s on me, I already have (accidentally 😅) deleted essential Linux files before. Fun times. I knew I was to blame though, it was a learning experience.
Maybe I’ll try to figure out what exactly I did wrong so I learn more than just “don’t poke” (which I wouldn’t stop doing anyway).