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!)
It’s the cleanest Windows install I’ve ever done, less than a month old, and there is world-renowned, enterprise-level antivirus software running. Malware is pretty much out of the question.
I did install
EdgeRemover(edit: misremembered name) MSEdgeRedirectbut it apparently does not quite work.So yeah, it is caused by a kind of malware, which you pay Microsoft for. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other choice due to our required software.
lol. better just use defender next time.
edit: or not use windows.
Yes, I use Linux on my personal machines, and I’m not advocating for Windows (in case you haven’t noticed). I can also assure you, the AV has better hit rate and user rating than Defender.
Looks like it doesn’t since your computer is clearly infected.
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).
This is actual malware behavior though, not Microsoft’s usual “pls use Edge” shtick. If it’s not malware, something has still gone very wrong.
I don’t disagree with you. I could have still messed up in a subtle way but at least the consequences don’t seem to be too serious.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s (third party) malware (that is, not by me or Microsoft) for another reason: viruses and trojans are not what they used to be. Unlike the 1990s, you won’t find much modern malware that does nothing but annoys the user (corporations, other users and freeware vendors do it plenty). People do it fir profit and they make adware, ransomware and cryptostealers, not some script kiddie’s batch file in the Startup folder that opens all executables in System32 simultaneously.
When Firefox started opening several blank tabs every second, I immediately knew it wasn’t malware but a misconfiguration: turns out it was trying to open a PDF in itself. I think this is another little mistake I made.
I think this is another little mistake I made.Like not listening to people that are telling you to stop acting like you know what you’re doing?
Hey! The stakes are low and the consequences are mild annoyance at worst (unless I’ve downloaded actual malware, which is unlikely because I follow precautions). Yes, I mess around with systems I shouldn’t but that’s just another learning experience.
“which you pay Microsoft for”
No. That’s not an Edge feature, that’s your shit that you broke yourself. I’m running five computers with Windows 11 and none of them have this behaviour, it’s not Microsoft doing partial rollouts as that would be all over tech news.
Don’t ask for opinions if you’re going to argue with everyone that clearly understand things better than you do.
Delete everything on your computer, do a full format of your hard drive, change all the passwords that computer could have had access to, don’t try to delete Edge from your next install of Windows as it’s a necessary feature and you just got pwnd for being an idiot that couldn’t understand that.
That’s clearly misconfiguration, not malware. Do you think modern malware would do obvious shit like this? I checked all installers on VirusTotal and most were FOSS, too.
Anyway, I know removing Edge can do weird stuff, it disabled biometric login on another PC.
The computer is not high-stakes, I don’t do personal stuff there and this is mild annoyance at worst. I’ll have ESET check the drive and reset Edge-related config.
Along with my personal ones I have a few windows 10/11 machines at work I manage and haven’t seen this happen, where the window just instantly re-opens like that.
Have you tried clearing the edge appdata folders to fully reset all the settings? Maybe some setting got screwed up.
Also maybe AV going haywire as a cause, lots of third party AV likes to do all kinds of weird stuff with your browsers. Windows defender is the go-to best option for windows these days, so if it turns out to be your third party AV you can pretty safely just get rid of it and switch back to defender.
I haven’t seen this behavior either but companies do partial “feature” rollouts all the time so I assume this is something like that.