I recently wanted to watch something a film and went to one of the first two sites listed on the Reddit’s r/Piracy mega thread under it’s online streaming section. I normally use an older laptop that I don’t care about and have no sensitive info on but wanted to stream to a projector and only my personal laptop had an hdmi port.
I downloaded firefox exclusively to use for piracy streaming but initially forgot to add ublock origin or another AV extension to the browser. When clicking anywhere on the site, a new tab would open that I’d need to close before I could actually engage with the website content (search, play, etc), which had been my experience in the past using online streaming sites. Once, one of the popup tabs opened and immediately started a file download without my permission. I didn’t open it and deleted it immediately but have recently been noticing some performance issues on my device Mostly that web pages and their content are slower to load than before and my computer has gotten overwhelmed and frozen a few times - not extremely substantially but enough that I’ve noticed a difference.
For context: I have a ThinkPad with windows 10 installed and an Intel i5 CPU. My default browser has been Opera for a few months now.
I just checked and the compressed zip file is in my recycling bin (not fully off my computer) and I’m not sure if/how it can affect my device without me ever opening or running its contents. I don’t have an antivirus background process on my device aside from the default Microsoft Defender Antivirus that comes with Windows 10.
Is there possibly somewhere I could upload the file to check for malware/scan the file to know what it does (titled “XVlDEOSs_Elena_Frost_IMG_223606” - searching for that title didn’t match anything on google)? Is there any chance the file is benign and the performance issues I’m noticing are unrelated to this situation?
TLDR: How concerned should I be about the possibility of a virus on my device from a popup window automatically downloading a zip file I never opened?
Would reinstalling my OS be the main/only possible resolution to a potential virus/worm/malware? I’d really like to avoid that if possible but many of the articles/info I can find about it have inconsistent info about risk and steps to take for resolution. I don’t know much about what kinds of risks I might’ve exposed my computer to. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
It’s very unlikely you are infected by anything unless you were using some crazy settings or addons, or unless you were hit by some extreme 0-day exploit that hasn’t become widespread yet. Firefox does not and normally cannot execute files it downloads automatically nor are videos a likely risk for remote code execution now that we have technologies like data execution prevention built into processors, if you’re attacked by malware it will rely on some other vector or trickery to get you to execute the file. I would expect that your performance issues are unrelated, but you should also check Firefox’s addons and extensions as well as your task manager startup tab to make sure nothing has obviously been installed without your knowledge.
One thing that sticks out at me is the fact that you only mention the file’s “title” and if you haven’t already you should make sure Windows Explorer is set up to ALWAYS show full file extensions, that’s like a basic safety measure that really should be on by default but isn’t, and it’s really mandatory if you’re messing around on the darker parts of the web. You have to know what kind of file extension it is because that affects what Windows is going to do with it, and when it’s supposed to be one thing and Windows is going to do something different with it that’s a huge red flag that it’s malware trying to trick you into running it.
You can upload the file to virustotal if you want to scan it but it doesn’t sound likely that it even ran unless you did something bad by accident.
Drives me MAD man. Absolutely MAD.
Thanks for the thorough reply! The download was a zipped folder with other files inside, my bad for not clarifying! I’m not sure how windows handles zip files compared to other file types but I’ll definitely look into that. Nothing obvious has been installed or added to Firefox as far as I can tell and I definitely checked out my task manager when my device performance started acting up. I appreciate your insight!