Downloaded/opened a virus...now what?

FDTerritory

I feel supremely stupid about this, but I figured I should probably get some advice. I got a Discord message from a friend I hadn't talked to in a while who made games in his free time back when I talked to him a lot. He said that he had made a new game and needed people to test it, and I agreed. He sent me an .rar file, I opened it, and Bitdefender started going nuts. I then realized that a scammer had lucked out and stolen the account of an actual game maker I knew to get me to open malware. Maybe I should have noticed earlier? I dunno. Anyways.

As I mentioned, BD went insane and started blocking a ton of attempts to access my machine or to install malware. It seemed to have blocked it all (no messages about finding things it couldn't deal with), and eventually asked me to restart my computer, which I did. I'm an hour into doing a full system scan, and there haven't been any additional pings on the virus side or malware files found. The "bad files" are in quarantine and I assume that I need to delete them when the scan is done. I turned off my automatic backup for a while just in case something kicks in later so I don't backup encrypted files, and the scammer even tried to message me again 20 minutes later asking if I installed it, which seems to indicate that if they were trying to get access to something specific they didn't get it.

So, long story short: if the full system scan comes out clean and I go through the password-protected files and recognize them, and I delete everything that's in quarantine, are there other steps I should take to be safe? Should I continue to do full scans for a bit? Obviously I'll look for password changes or anything like that, but how do I proceed from here? Thanks in advance.

Flexx

https://community.bitdefender.com/en/discussion/97667/downloaded-opened-a-virus-now-what

Kindly follow the below steps:

1) Restart your PC in safe mode. You can follow this guide:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/start-your-pc-in-safe-mode-in-windows-92c27cff-db89-8644-1ce4-b3e5e56fe234

2) Open the Run command and execute the following commands one by one:

temp – delete all the files in the folder.

%temp% – delete all the files in the folder.

prefetch – delete all the files in the folder.

3) Restart your PC in normal mode by unselecting the option to run the system in Safe Mode, then click 'Apply.'

4) Reset your web browsers:

Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3296214?hl=en

Mozilla Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings

Microsoft Edge: https://malwaretips.com/blogs/reset-microsoft-edge/

Opera: https://browsersolution.com/reset-opera-browser

Vivaldi: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/install-update/full-reset-of-vivaldi/

Brave: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017903152-How-do-I-reset-Brave-settings-to-default-

5) Reset the Windows host file to default. You can find instructions here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-reset-the-hosts-file-back-to-the-default-c2a43f9d-e176-c6f3-e4ef-3500277a6dae.

6) Run Disk Cleanup using this guide: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/disk-cleanup-in-windows-8a96ff42-5751-39ad-23d6-434b4d5b9a68

7) Run a full scan with your bitdefender product for one more time. If everything shows clean, you are safe.

Regards

Gjoksi

Hello.

You could also scan (and disinfect, if needed) your PC with Bitdefender Rescue Environment:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/29132/

Regards.

FDTerritory

Thanks y'all...I did all of the above two comments and everything came up clean, so I seem to have done what I can control. The help is very appreciated. :)