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moniss

(8,904 posts)
6. My warning to you is that the more you wait and use your computer the worse it
Fri Feb 20, 2026, 11:56 PM
Friday

will get. I've been hacked badly years ago and I give you the following advice.

Disconnect from any wi-fi or internet. Then shut down your computer. Now call either a computer repair or if you have Norton or something similar you can call them but the repair shop would be better. When I say call I mean call. No e-mail under any circumstances even from a phone. The shop will have you bring in the affected computer and they will rid the machine of the problem. Norton and others can do so as well but they aren't what they used to be and they can be more limited in what they will do for you even under their paid services.

When it happened to me the Norton guy took remote control of my machine, restarted it in safe mode and then spent the next couple of hours going through my machine. He said I could watch him or not and I did watch since I wanted to see what was being done and how it's done. He downloaded and ran a program that would scan way deep into the registry etc. and it would stop and highlight a file in red that would have weird, atypical words describing the file for example. Then he would use that program to isolate the file and if the infected file was a necessary system file he would note that. It was a long, long process but it worked and it showed me just how deep and problematic the problems can embed themselves.

Once he was done removing things, there were various restarts and analysis of system files to be sure what needed to be there was correct and uninfected. All files were then scanned and likewise verified as OK. Then more restarts and then we were done. But a computer shop will do this "cleaning" for you for not that much usually. Before the Norton guy I had it done one other time and my guy charged me $100.00 and I had my computer back in 2 days. That time the guy copied my files of documents, pics etc. and then quarantined them, checked them, noted my software that was in addition to Windows 98, wiped my hard drive completely, reinstalled a clean version of Windows, did a new install of my other programs and then loaded my documents and pics etc.

Don't keep trying to do anything at all on your computer even if Chrome etc. seems OK for awhile. The problem will continue to spread on your computer and eventually that freeze might have you lose/freeze almost everything.

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