Bitdefender nuked itself and my entire system for no reason

meimei123
meimei123
edited June 8 in Protection - Malware/ Firmware/etc.

Hello all,

Sorry, this is my first time posting on this forum, if I need to move my post elsewhere please state.

I am quite puzzled as to what just occurred and would like some insight to help me better
understand why and how this managed to happen, and also, how to fix the aftermath.

So, what happened?

I had just come back from the bathroom, and upon sitting down in my chair and logging into my system, Bitdefender decided to show a Disinfection Warning. I thought to myself: "what could this possibly be, I haven't downloaded anything recently?"—but would shortly realize that would be the least of my problems.

The disinfection warning then went away, but before I could forget about it another one popped up, as well as the Bitdefender app widget, which showed thirteen notifications, thirteen! I had previously had zero, so obviously I was scratching my head at what they could possibly be. I tried to click on the notification icon to see, but I couldn't, the click wouldn't register. Okay, I thought to myself, not that bad, it's probably just prioritizing the antimalware engine rather than the app, so I waited. Bad choice.

Bitdefender then decided it had had enough of my PC and then without warning decided to close every app I had running (how wonderful), crashing Wallpaper Engine, Firefox, Discord, the Settings App, File Explorer and VSCode. OK, fair enough, maybe it needed to do that, right? Wrong. It then crashed explorer.exe before eventually causing a stop error (blue screen of death). Wonderful, Bitdefender has gone rouge. This all happened within the span of ~40 seconds.

After restarting my PC and trying to boot back into windows, it froze at "Preparing windows", no biggie, I'll give it a minute. 17 minutes later, I decided to restart because it had completely died. I then managed to get into my system which was, understandably, completely broken. Wallpaper Engine refused to launch, Steam was logged out, Discord refused to launch (I had Vencord, so fair enough), etc. I thought, oh well, things happen when malware tries to spread, probably got it with an infostealer. That was my thought process until I then tried to open Bitdefender, which was logged out. Okay… fantastic. I then logged in to the familiar 13 notifications and could actually see what they were, except, nothing was there. What?

So let's recap, Bitdefender has gone rogue, corrupted half of my apps, logged itself out and now there are no malware reports? It doesn't stop there, though!

After searching around the app it decided to crash, and upon opening it through the tray again I was hit with a massive "Your subscription has expired" warning. Greeeaaat (And before someone comments, yes, this was the real bitdefender, it was signed and not with something implanted into the Trusted Root Cert Authority).

After restarting YET AGAIN, I was finally able to login to bitdefender and get everything configured back to what it was. It seems it was just a one time error… is what I would say, if it was not for the fact that Bitdefender invalidates my login every time I launch the app now, and refuses to reinstall itself properly.

If anyone who works at Bitdefender can explain what happened, that would be great. I have absolutely no idea what could have possibly caused this…

edit: This was also in correlation with Bitdefender trying to update itself, and the first Disinfection Warning was Wallpaper Engine, before it went rogue.

edit 2: It deleted ShareX and mullvad for no reason.

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