Hi all,

First off: Can’t switch to Linux, Windows is a work requirement. Please spare me.

With that out of the way, here’s my problem:

Since 2-3 days I’ve been seeing ads disguised as a minimized video player popup on my Windows 10 Login Screen image.

Initially I thought I might have been watching something on youtube and forgot to close the tab and it autoplayed in the background until reaching this stuff by chance; but that turned out not to be the case (I’m also using Firefox exclusively, which I thought wouldn’t integrate with Windows, but I wasn’t 100% sure on that end).

I tried to research this a bit, but the only similar case I found was in an old reddit thread saying that some Windows update installed the LinkedIn App for them, which is not the case here.

Antivirus (Bit Defender) and Malwarebytes both give me a clean report.

So I did some more digging and right click that thing with my firewall set to deny all to figure out where this is taking me, and surprise…

Image

There’s a total of 100 connection attempts from Windows Search to around 10 different IP addresses, all of which belong to Microsoft.

I have not installed any updates in the last 14 days, no new software, and have not changed any system settings.

What did change is that I am currently not in China, where I normally live, but am on a business trip to Malaysia, where a bunch of services that are blocked in China might be accessible, and are now splicing in those (somewhat disguised) ads.

Does this happen to anyone else, and if so, do you have an idea how to get rid of it?

Thanks a lot in advance!

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    019·
    4 months ago

    Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

    Fuck you too. 👍

    It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

    To think they could be paying nothing for better software instead.

    It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

    As soon as you need to decrypt that data, you’re at best trusting that data to the NT kernel if you use a memory filesystem.

    It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

    I’ve never heard the terminology domain account. Does it prevent you from using a different OS?

    It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

    I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some way to get some of these to work on not-windows / not-macos. Either a webclient or Pidgin, the everything client :)

    If you’re on Linux, the company may have even released a proprietary native client, but I’d consider that a last resort as it compromises security and privacy.

    It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

    https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive

    And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

    If your HR is that cancer I’d try looking for a different company. If they are scared of “unmanaged” devices why are they using a spyware OS.

    Your IT department won’t give a crap. But they also won’t help if anything doesn’t work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

    You shouldn’t be using Unix in production unless you know how to use Unix, I agree.

    • T (they/she)@beehaw.org
      6·
      4 months ago

      Sometimes I have doubts if some people I see posting here on Lemmy actually work. It seems like y’all live in this Wonderland where finding new jobs is extremely easy and convincing whole companies to use free software is easy like sending an e-mail. I’m honestly envious.

      But still, the fact that the person already said that not using Windows isn’t an option and you persisted questioning wasn’t very nice, so I see no reason for you to be rude and offensive when someone call out your behavior. Please keep it civil.

      • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
        31·
        4 months ago

        But still, the fact that the person already said that not using Windows isn’t an option and you persisted questioning wasn’t very nice

        I wasn’t telling them that they should use Linux anyways, I wanted to know why they weren’t allowed to.