FU is still in progress and I have no way of knowing when it started, which may be what is stressing me out the most right now. So come with me on a journey of regret while my fourth malware scanner of the night sits at 64% and my friends have gone to bed.
So the story, I guess, would begin back when I first started university, about five years ago. I got into art school for visual communication and planned on becoming an animator. To celebrate and to support me, my dad bought me a kick ass lenovo gaming laptop with the power of a billion suns (as you may come to guess, I am not tech savvy. Definitely not tech savvy enough to own this laptop) capable of running several adobe programs at once, with a RAM wide enough to put my mother's behind to shame, with an internal disk memory as big as the disappointment in my father's eyes. College begins, websites for illicit procuration of expensive programs exist, my naive young sunshine self doesn't even know what a VPN is, and for some reason which is is causing me an enormous amount of self-hatred right now, owning a top of the range gaming laptop with amazing everything doesn't seem like a good enough reason for me to pay for an antivirus, so I go with the free software, the ffp1 option, the least-amount-of-having-to-think-about-it choice, because I would totally NOT regret that later, perhaps five years later, at 3 AM - ironically while trying to animate for the first time ever.
I continue my happy little life with my absolute beast of a laptop but shit happens and I never actually go into animation, I go into printmaking, which is the most analog of art forms possibly ever, so between having a huge amount of studio work, thesis research and just life stuff, my laptop spends the prime of his life as a glorified facebook machine, a particularly large and lovely screen to watch parks and rec on perhaps. Or so I think...
Now I may have noticed performance issues at various points, in fact now that I think about it I moved away from using photoshop a long time ago, and when I think about it further I even got a new wacom tablet last winter, because of the unbearable lag... the shame covers me like a wet blanket. What a fucking idiot. No refrigerator-buzz noises, wheezing fans or uncomfortably hot undersides were enough to make me go "hey, perhaps my free antivirus is a piece of rubbish, and it would be worth ten minutes of my time to run a slightly deeper scan than just the automatic stuff that I even only run when it gets absolutely forced on me". No. I had to just plow on, forgetting that my computer ever ran quietly at all, or that it once harnessed the power of a billion suns, that crashes and reboots and long waiting times are not supposed to happen.
Around October 2019 I got annoyed enough to look into how to even use a split drive computer for the first time, and I moved all my bulky user folders to a different drive, and patted myself on the shoulder real good for being such a computer wizard. Hell I even cleaned my registry!
But let's get to the point... amongst many minor technological issues for which my solution is to ignore until I forget, is the fact that my phones memory is full because i am constantly photographing everything with it, but for some reason my laptop stopped recognising my phone as a device. So I started poking around yesterday, and when I tried to update windows I got an error code saying that one or more updates failed. You know that scene in Spirited Away when San pulls on a tiny string in the side of the super stinky bath house guest and a huge stream of pollution comes roaring out? Yeah. Somewhere at the horizon of my mind the thought passed by that it was weird that I hadn't been getting push notifications about windows updates. I looked for my antivirus, and lo and behold, it is gone. I googled some stupid shit like "why has my antivirus disappeared ", get some stupid first-result answer, and leave it at that.
Today as I am following my first animation course online (well done me, yay) as I stare at the endless unjustified blue loading circle next to my cursor my idle mind wanders to my nonexistent antivirus, and i figure i should download a new one. So i do, and i run a scan, and it gives me a warning for one problematic file: Win64: Malware-Gen Trojan. Eek, I think, I have only an extremely vague notion of what that is but I'm sure it's no fun. So I find a lovely step by step guide with pictures made for idiots like me which walks me through the installation of a whole parade of malware scans, and the first one finds 22 malware files, of which 5 Trojans, PUMs to disable my firewall, security centre and antivirus, and 15 PUPs including stuff that apparently had to be manually installed by the user even though I've never seen it before, and one lovely shitty cherry on top, the bitcoin miner.
After removing all those I run the next scan, it comes up with loads of new issues. Then I download and run a third scanner, still more problematic files found. And finally one in a file location that gives me some indication as when this started happening: in year 1 of college when I very briefly dipped my toes into a bunch of fancy programs and then never opened them again for not having had the time or energy.
So there we have it folks, my beast processors have been mining bitcoin for someone for what may have been five years while I watched porn and browsed reddit, and now that i actually sat down to do what this laptop was bought to do, instead i am spending entire days ridding it of a wonderful garden of malware that someone has planted and tended. Karma, bitch. And the worst thing is that I will never know exactly what they did, if they were after more than my bitcoin potential, whether they have been accessing other stuff. Tomorrow I'm changing all my passwords and pins, growing a moustache, and moving to Florida. The morale of this story is: live up to the gifts you receive.
TL;DR: I was gifted a brand new gaming laptop to become an animator. I downloaded a bunch of programs, never used them, maintained nonexistent safety practices and was an unknowing bitcoin mine for possibly five years.
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