Question How reliable is Windows 11 Defender "Full Scan"?

[Fastfishy2]

I was trying to find a new wallpaper for my brand-new Asus TUF A15 laptop. Tried to go onto one of those (extremely annoying) wallpaper hosting sites and it kept asking me to tick a captcha and "allow notifications" which I (stupidly) did. The process kept looping so I gave up and got my wallpaper elsewhere.

Went and played half an hour of Cyberpunk and alt-tabbed out to check messages only to have my chrome notifications going off the hook with fake "VIRUS ALERT" notifications all up the sidebar. I immediately tried to go into my chrome settings to remove the culprit website's notification permissions but the popups were blocking my chrome settings area so I tried to click the "X" on one to make room.

Big mistake. It opened a new chrome tab trying to load some webpage. I closed the tab before it could even display anything, less than a second later.

Once I managed to revoke all permissions from the target webpage everything went away but I was still worried so I had windows defender do a full scan which took about 30 minutes as this laptop still only has a 512gb SSD at the moment. It found no threats.

My question is, how reliable is this? Should I be worried as long as the PC continues to behave normally?

 

[MJS WARLORD]

I was trying to find a new wallpaper for my brand-new Asus TUF A15 laptop. Tried to go onto one of those (extremely annoying) wallpaper hosting sites and it kept asking me to tick a captcha and "allow notifications" which I (stupidly) did. The process kept looping so I gave up and got my wallpaper elsewhere.

Went and played half an hour of Cyberpunk and alt-tabbed out to check messages only to have my chrome notifications going off the hook with fake "VIRUS ALERT" notifications all up the sidebar. I immediately tried to go into my chrome settings to remove the culprit website's notification permissions but the popups were blocking my chrome settings area so I tried to click the "X" on one to make room.

Big mistake. It opened a new chrome tab trying to load some webpage. I closed the tab before it could even display anything, less than a second later.

Once I managed to revoke all permissions from the target webpage everything went away but I was still worried so I had windows defender do a full scan which took about 30 minutes as this laptop still only has a 512gb SSD at the moment. It found no threats.

My question is, how reliable is this? Should I be worried as long as the PC continues to behave normally?

download and install malwarebytes , 2 of the features only work for about 2 weeks before it asks you to pay but you can can on without them as the free version.

After you have done a scan if it finds anything do quarantine and delete then repeat until the program finds nothing , this is because some items can be in segments so they dont always get found and deleted on the first scans.

 

[Fastfishy2]

download and install malwarebytes , 2 of the features only work for about 2 weeks before it asks you to pay but you can can on without them as the free version.

After you have done a scan if it finds anything do quarantine and delete then repeat until the program finds nothing , this is because some items can be in segments so they dont always get found and deleted on the first scans.

Just doing the malwarebytes free version scan now.

 

[Fastfishy2]

MB found nothing from a full scan either. Reckon I'm in the clear.

 

[Cilantro7536]

Here are some more reliable 2nd opinion scanners. They are often used for cleanup on Malware Removal Help forums on BleepingComputer and MalwareTip:

• ESET online scanner (slow but presumably one of the most thorough tools)
• Sophos scan and clean (fast but are often used as a secondary tool for a definite malware infection event)

 

[JayGau]

If neither Windows Defender and Malwarebytes find anything you should be good. I would also delete cache and cookies in Chrome just to make sure nothing is left from this site.

 

[Fastfishy2]

If neither Windows Defender and Malwarebytes find anything you should be good. I would also delete cache and cookies in Chrome just to make sure nothing is left from this site.

Yup did that as well. Scorched earth. honestly this incident is a bit embarrassing for me because I've always been one of those "best AV is common sense" types, learnt a lot downloading sketchy Minecraft mods back when I was in my early teens, never click links, etc. I think the problem here was it was masquerading as a captcha which I've never seen before. Lesson learned I guess.

 

[punkncat]

I feel like you got loaded with that "web page" alert window that most folks know you can simply close. The issue comes hitting that contact or proceed button. Even at that, dealing with anything of that nature can be unnerving. I am a fan of the Windows Defender program and the level of effectiveness it shows in PARTICULAR in line with an appropriate UAC or even -user- (elevated) level(s). Alongside what you mention above as common sense browsing I personally don't run into issue very often. At least none I am aware of.

With that said, if I suspect to deeply, I am not one to be afraid to "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." mentality.

I have personally found a lot of those "malware scanners" just come up with something to find for the full on warm fuzzy. Further research often indicates what they found was nothing in the first place.

 

[JayGau]

Yup did that as well. Scorched earth. honestly this incident is a bit embarrassing for me because I've always been one of those "best AV is common sense" types, learnt a lot downloading sketchy Minecraft mods back when I was in my early teens, never click links, etc. I think the problem here was it was masquerading as a captcha which I've never seen before. Lesson learned I guess.

Even the most careful person on the planet can be fooled. I always laugh when I read people saying that they don't care about antimalware software since they are "smart" enough to never click on suspicious links or go on shady websites (ironic that someone who thinks like this is obviously not as smart as they think). Scammers and hackers work very hard to make their stuff look and feel legit so nobody is totally safe.

Those browser notification permissions are really a pain by the way. It's so easy for a malicious website to trick you to enable it without your consent and start sending you fake alerts to make you click and download dangerous files. It happened to one of my colleagues not long ago. He just clicked on some news he found interesting and started to get fake virus alerts from the site. Fortunately he told us before clicking on anything and I could just disable the notifications and clear the browser.

Just a tip: when you see a suspicious window like this, don't try to close it with the x on the window itself, always close it from either the task bar (right-click and select "close") or the task manager (kill all the web browser processes).