cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/14206569
Hi all,
First off: Can't switch to Linux, Windows is a work requirement. Please spare me.
With that out of the way, here's my problem:
Since 2-3 days I've been seeing ads disguised as a minimized video player popup on my Windows 10 Login Screen
.
Initially I thought I might have been watching something on youtube and forgot to close the tab and it autoplayed in the background until reaching this stuff by chance; but that turned out not to be the case (I'm also using Firefox exclusively, which I thought wouldn't integrate with Windows, but I wasn't 100% sure on that end).
I tried to research this a bit, but the only similar case I found was in an old reddit thread saying that some Windows update installed the LinkedIn App for them, which is not the case here.
Antivirus (Bit Defender) and Malwarebytes both give me a clean report.
So I did some more digging and right click that thing with my firewall set to deny all to figure out where this is taking me, and surprise...
There's a total of 100 connection attempts from Windows Search to around 10 different IP addresses, all of which belong to Microsoft.
I have not installed any updates in the last 14 days, no new software, and have not changed any system settings.
What did change is that I am currently not in China, where I normally live, but am on a business trip to Malaysia, where a bunch of services that are blocked in China might be accessible, and are now splicing in those (somewhat disguised) ads.
Does this happen to anyone else, and if so, do you have an idea how to get rid of it?
Thanks a lot in advance!
But the company doesn't have the money. Stock value means investor valuation, not company funds.
Once a company goes public for the very first time, it's getting money into its account, but from then on forward, that's just investors speculating and hoping on a nice return when they sell again.
Of course there should be some correlation between the company's profitability and the stock price, so ideally they do have quite some money, but in an investment craze like this, the correlation is far from 1:1. So whether they can still afford to build the data centers remains to be seen.