- Jan 3, 2018
- 3
Hello everyone,
Here is my situation. I have a computer right now with no operating system. It has 1 SSD, 1HDD, and 1 DVD drive. It went from having a pirated version of Windows 7 to a pirated version of Windows 10. I saw a process called KMS- R@1n always running in the background. I learned that it was simply an activator used to keep Windows 10 genuine. Every source I found told me that it was harmless. The computer was also being used to download games illegally and occasionally the security software being used at the time (Avast anti virus and COMODO firewall) would detect the cracks. These detection's were interpreted to be false positives to the user at the time.
For sometime I thought the computer was infected because the CPU usage would be unusually high when the computer was at idle but this was rectified using a clean boot. What caused the unusual CPU usage was conflicting software/drivers. The clean boot brought the usage back to normal. Windows 10 was still acting kind of glitchy/buggy and I was just not satisified.
I ran scans with multiple cyber security programs:
-Avast! (both the full-regular system scans and the boot-time scan) showed no threats detected,
-Malwarebytes(full scan including rootkits) showed no threats detected
-Anvisoft Rescue Disk showed no threats detected
-Avira Rescue disk showed 3 threats all of which were Trojans. Avira took the action of renaming the first two and ignoring the third. I took this to mean that they were false positives because no other program detected them. However I still deleted the associated files from the disk and performed another scan. When I scanned the second time no threats were detected.
Being the paranoid person I am I decided to format my SSD (where the OS was kept) and update my BIOS. I also bought a legitimate copy of Windows 10 which will be arriving shortly. However there is still some data on my HDD, some of which I need. I've scanned the HDD again with Avira rescue disk and Anvisoft Rescue disk, both came back clean. Do you think the contents of the HDD are free from infection? I was thinking of moving the files I need to an external hard drive and format the HDD but will that just infect external hard drive? Do you think it is safe to use with the computer once I install Windows 10 on the SSD? I was also planning on purchasing Norton Security instead of the free antivirus and firewall I was using before, do you think it is worth it or am I just throwing money down the drain?
I would like to thank you all for welcoming me to this forum, I heard this was the best place on the internet to go for help regarding cyber security.
Here is my situation. I have a computer right now with no operating system. It has 1 SSD, 1HDD, and 1 DVD drive. It went from having a pirated version of Windows 7 to a pirated version of Windows 10. I saw a process called KMS- R@1n always running in the background. I learned that it was simply an activator used to keep Windows 10 genuine. Every source I found told me that it was harmless. The computer was also being used to download games illegally and occasionally the security software being used at the time (Avast anti virus and COMODO firewall) would detect the cracks. These detection's were interpreted to be false positives to the user at the time.
For sometime I thought the computer was infected because the CPU usage would be unusually high when the computer was at idle but this was rectified using a clean boot. What caused the unusual CPU usage was conflicting software/drivers. The clean boot brought the usage back to normal. Windows 10 was still acting kind of glitchy/buggy and I was just not satisified.
I ran scans with multiple cyber security programs:
-Avast! (both the full-regular system scans and the boot-time scan) showed no threats detected,
-Malwarebytes(full scan including rootkits) showed no threats detected
-Anvisoft Rescue Disk showed no threats detected
-Avira Rescue disk showed 3 threats all of which were Trojans. Avira took the action of renaming the first two and ignoring the third. I took this to mean that they were false positives because no other program detected them. However I still deleted the associated files from the disk and performed another scan. When I scanned the second time no threats were detected.
Being the paranoid person I am I decided to format my SSD (where the OS was kept) and update my BIOS. I also bought a legitimate copy of Windows 10 which will be arriving shortly. However there is still some data on my HDD, some of which I need. I've scanned the HDD again with Avira rescue disk and Anvisoft Rescue disk, both came back clean. Do you think the contents of the HDD are free from infection? I was thinking of moving the files I need to an external hard drive and format the HDD but will that just infect external hard drive? Do you think it is safe to use with the computer once I install Windows 10 on the SSD? I was also planning on purchasing Norton Security instead of the free antivirus and firewall I was using before, do you think it is worth it or am I just throwing money down the drain?
I would like to thank you all for welcoming me to this forum, I heard this was the best place on the internet to go for help regarding cyber security.