r/computerviruses • • May 22 '26

Question i found this .txt

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950 Upvotes

While deleting things to free up storage, I found a .txt file named memz_readme and opened it to verify what it was... I don't have much experience with this and it's my family's computer. Can someone help me figure out if it's true or how I can fix it?

r/computerviruses • • 29d ago

Question Expiro virus

366 Upvotes

Plz can anyone help me get ride of this virus? It's called expiro.da.mtb

r/computerviruses • • Jul 05 '26

Question my cousins pc got a virus

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331 Upvotes

yeah so he called me saying he needs help and he showed me this, i have no idea how he got this and he doesn’t know either, he told me about it because i usually help him with the computer stuff but this time i honestly don’t know what to do about it
he also got emails saying that someone tried logging into his discord and other apps, but i helped him change the passwords and secure everything so he’s good with that,
it’s just with his pc now, it’s literally dead and you can’t do much with it because this screen pops up everytime he boots up

so if there is any solution to this then please let me know it would mean a lot 🙏

r/computerviruses • • Aug 20 '26

Question wtf is T?

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479 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • May 24 '26

Question Is this text-mode black screen an official antivirus rescue feature, or malware?

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310 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I recently ran into a shady game installer downloaded from a torrent. After installation I rebooted. And weird, text-mode black screen outside of Windows poped up.

The screen displayed text:

"The antivirus solution installed on your system is cleaning your computer..." followed by a slow "Deleting....." animation, and after few seconds it ended with "Finished successfully!" before booting back into Windows.

I was using Bitdefender Antivirus Free.

I asked an AI about it, and I got two completely opposite answers:

One said it’s a 100% fake scareware screen (ransomware/wiper) trying to buy time while encrypting files in the background.

Another said it's a legitimate, rare emergency feature of Bitdefender called Boot Scan / Rescue Environment that triggers outside of Windows to safely delete locked malware.

Can anyone confirm if Bitdefender Free actually uses a built-in text mode screen like this during a boot scan? Or is it a malware?

Thanks for any insights!

r/computerviruses • • Jun 26 '26

Question is this roblox shader a virus or just a fallse positive?

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10 Upvotes

the shader is called "maxeys visuals" and it is a shader for roblox, there was in like 2023 a shader called roshade for roblox that got banned and now is unusable, and this one is pretty recent, you get it from a discord server that has 5k people and is actually active, the moderators are saying it's a false positive and that it is safe, and theres also an uncut video showing how to activate it and the person who made the video actually using it at the end, you use reshade on one of the applications in the folder, launch roblox and then open that application that you used reshade on and it activates as shown in the video and told by the mods, however it has almost 40 detections on virustotal, now it would be ok if it was like 4 detections or something low, but 40?? can it really be a false positive if it has over 40 detections? i don't play roblox that much anymore but it would be cool to go back to when i had shaders, however i don't think risking my pc for some app that makes roblox look better is worth it. so is it safe? or just an obvious virus?

virustotal link: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5c5c5157beb1a6c25eb13bfd4f547447b13e79a2fc5e707aaf36433a27a92a7a/detection

r/computerviruses • • Jul 28 '26

Question Got this from the Jagex official launcher.

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393 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • Jul 11 '26

Question What is this? I found a ton of them they are almost everywhere

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256 Upvotes

Recently, Malwarebytes blocked a few connections, and since I’m a pretty paranoid person, I decided to check the Registry Editor (Regedit). I found these entries, and some of them point to files in the Temp folder. I know the blocked connections and these registry entries are probably unrelated, but what exactly are these entries? Are they normal, or should I be concerned

Windows 11
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Random ass characters

*I wanna reinstall windows, Also the imagepath leads to temp which i find very unusual

ImagePath REG_EXPAND_SZ \??\C:\Users\CD86~1\AppData\Local\Temp\ Random characters

Start REG_DWORD 0x000000004 (4)
Type REG_DWORD 0x000000001 (1)

r/computerviruses • • 16d ago

Question Suspicious YouTube Activity

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163 Upvotes

Hey all, while I was sleeping- a video / livestream from around 2 to 3 hours ago ended up in my watch history. Upon clicking on it, the video is sitting at 1.2 million views, it’s unlisted and there’s comments of people saying they didn’t watch it. I’ve reported the video already and I’ve changed my password from my phone.

Is this some sort of YouTube exploit or is this someone using my cookies to view bot someone’s livestream? I’m unsure what to do right now, my PC is currently turned off and disconnected from the WiFi as I do that every night, should I run a virus scan or should I bite the bullet and go for a full reinstall? Please let me know because I don’t want to risk losing anything over something that isn’t something to worry about.

r/computerviruses • • 7d ago

Question Found these in AppData/Roaming. Are they viruses?

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236 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • 15d ago

Question Cadaver? Appears then disappears, pretty scary...

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128 Upvotes

This suddenly appears then disappears in my task manager. Considering the name it's pretty scary. Can't find anything about it online either

r/computerviruses • • 28d ago

Question Windows defender keeps giving me notifcations that its off but its on

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186 Upvotes

Had to take picture because you cant screenshot that panel

r/computerviruses • • Jul 15 '26

Question Is this malware. What should I do? windows 11

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161 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • Jul 12 '26

Question Tried to download emulator and got a keylogger instead, what do we do?

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87 Upvotes

Hi there I went on citronemu(dot)com and ended up with a keylogger as a renpy -as we only checked online forums about if after downloading, we do not want to power wash our pc as it’s like a digital memory book. Ran an offline windows inspection and it found nothing and currently running a windows full inspection that is going to take three more hours, and the pc was disconnected from the internet after 5minutes along with important accounts.

Please help

r/computerviruses • • May 15 '26

Question Accidentally downloaded Malware

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118 Upvotes

Some virus automatically gained access to my discord and sent scam text with a link to all my friends

Context:

So recently I was trying to download pirated games. I was redirected to a different download file and my stupid ass thought it was the game file. The files were 8 parts, around 800 mb each. I extracted one and ran an installer, which didn't do anything even after hitting 100%. I realised it was the wrong files and deleted them immediately.

From that day, my accounts(snap, insta, fb, discord) started to send me email that someone is trying to sign into my accounts. Thankfully i had 2FA enabled in most of the apps but my discord got compromised amd it sent scam messages to every single person I know of.

But my laptop has a lot of personal documents and credentials. Is there any way to get rid of this virus somehow? I do have the photo of the thumbnail of the virus files, given above

r/computerviruses • • Aug 14 '26

Question Cmd opened up at a random time with this

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145 Upvotes

I know the irony about the dice but still. Halp.

I own this game on steam but still

It opened it self and the closed it self right afterwards

Found out how to edit.

r/computerviruses • • Aug 10 '26

Question Random Installer on PC

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97 Upvotes

This random installer setup window popped up, what is this!?

Edit: Thanks to [u/AvailableDirtForSale](u/AvailableDirtForSale), I think I’ve narrowed it down to the Opera Browser. A while back, Opera was acting weird and installing a random extension. I tried to delete Opera, but it wouldn’t let me. I eventually figured it out and deleted it, but unfortunately just now I found the Opera folder in “C:/Users/Username/AppData/Local/Programs/Opera”.

This also seems to be tied to Advanced Installer

I can’t seem to delete it, it says I need admin rights even though I am admin. If anybody has any suggestions, please share them 🙏

r/computerviruses • • Jul 23 '26

Question Guys what is this

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163 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • Jul 06 '26

Question Hacker email me

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9 Upvotes

Recently, I installed a cracked software but it wasn't a prn site and I already nuke my windows laptop by formatting it using reset this pc and changed all my passwords. I'm wondering, why the hacker sent me an email like this? Am I still in trouble?

r/computerviruses • • Sep 08 '26

Question Found these at my mothers laptop, what should i do?

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102 Upvotes

Do i have to reinstall windows or request for disinfection from this reedit community? And no i did NOT download anything in my mothers laptop, i found this recently while looking at windows defender history, do i have to tell her to change her passwords or anything and what can this thing do

r/computerviruses • • Jul 20 '26

Question Anyone know what this is

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53 Upvotes

Ive had 5 people spam this to me onw person got hacked like 2 times in a row anyone know what caused it?

r/computerviruses • • Jun 14 '26

Question Why are so many people falling for the “Renpy” infostealer?

72 Upvotes

Hi. I’ve been following this sub for quite a while and there’s no day passing without people asking for help with the infostealer that ends up in posting the usual scam messages on Instagram / Discord. To me it feels like there was a spark in “activity” about a year ago and i’m really wondering why.

- Is it because people are too careless when it comes to sailing the seas?

- Have the attackers just found an easy way to sneak in malware?

I’m really curious about this. Excuse me if the questions have been asked before (p sure they were…).

r/computerviruses • • Aug 18 '26

Question A blank app name was stopping my laptop from restarting any help?

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145 Upvotes

r/computerviruses • • 12d ago

Question Is this a malware attack or infostealer?

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71 Upvotes

Whenever I open Google Chrome and try to search for something, I always get a message saying that Google detected unusual traffic from my network.
I tried using Brave Browser, and I don’t get the same message there. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Google Chrome, but the same prompt still appears.
Has anyone experienced this before? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

r/computerviruses • • Aug 15 '26

Question Paranoia is literally killing me due to this.

68 Upvotes

DO NOT USE STEAMUNLOCKED. for context I'm VERY young and a year or so ago I downloaded a few games from steamunlocked, it was the first day of summer break of 2025 and I was so stubborn I thought I wouldn't get a malware at all, I just thought "it's Malware, not that big of an issue!" And downloaded like 8 games, now time skip to the late summer break of 2026, 11 days ago, my windows key started glitching in the morning. I didn't do anything but it didn't work, I just let it be and decided to face it at night, I downloaded Malwarebytes but I didn't enable "detect toolkits." After scanning it turns out I had a fucking Trojan hijack, which I let sit there for over a year, I deleted it 11 days pass (which is now) and I woke up due to a nightmare where I lost everything on my PC and had the worst virus ever, my paranoia is this bad by the way, anyways I went to delete all my files and I wanna tell u all I've deleted the games months before I downloaded Malwarebytes, but somehow the games were still there?? I permanently deleted them again and decided to Google what was happening, It told me to enable toolkits while scanning and I did and after the scan I literally found 3 honeygain FILES. I'm legit tweaking rn brah😭😭