Edit: Folks, I keep telling you it’s VERY unlikely to be malware.
I’ll update you and apologize to each if my credit card gets wiped or something but I’m quite sure I’m safe, don’t worry.
Also sorry for blaming Microsoft for what is apparently my fault.
I accidentally clicked Microsoft Edge on my work computer with Windows 10 and couldn’t close it — it just keeps reopening. It takes File Shredder to stop it from opening again, at least until the computer restarts.
Notice the ads, most are extremely sketchy (my frequent reload in previous takes caused the ad server + my work VPN to rate limit me):
- China warns:
%user.currency%is dead! (Yeah, sure. Obvious propaganda. Generic pictures or faked images of a worthless banknote giveaway.) - 63-year-old figured out! (Does not say what but a pic of obviously young-looking feet.)
- Make boatloads of money with AI! (aka auto-trade very uncompetitive options, no guarantees on withdrawals of any wins)
- Save money using solar! (The company is legitimate but the deal on panels is probably not great)
- Buy yourself a great new FPCEILPTBSP! (You can’t tell what it is and neither can we! (Apparently TV wall mount))
- Losing hair?
- Millionaire has genius method you can try (but give us money first, making his pic transparent so we can put him in front of
%user.country.flag%was difficult) - Game! Yay! (Microtransactions galore!)
- Get EVERYTHING in your car fixed (by a stock photo mechanic!)
Ah so you also have the fake “china says euro is dead” ads that promote a scam shitcoin. I thought it was a local scam only for my country. I always flag those ads but they always come back with a different URL. Zero control from Microsoft
I once got Top 7 Luxury Cruise in (Landlocked) Czech Republic from Microsoft. Also, The Flight Price From
%user.location%(village of 200 people) To New York Will Surprise You
Definitely something wrong with your computer, not normal behavior
deleted by creator
This is textbook browser takeover activity. Is your enterprise level world renown AV setup correctly?
Who is it by the way. Just curious
Edit: by the way the freeware tool you downloaded to remove edge which “didn’t work” sounds like it did work and it took over your browser.
Ding ding ding! OP drank the Kool Aid and felt like they needed to completely remove Edge, they downloaded a tool made to bait gullible users and they’re now stuck with a malware and won’t admit it.
The question OP needs to ask themselves is, why ask for opinions when they will ignore all of them?
Nope, the tool is FOSS MSEdgeRedirect, very well known and praised. I think it’s purely my config mistake with no third-party wrongdoing and I will live with the consequence of Edge being slightly more annoying whenever I accidentally click it.
In a way what you do proves vendors like MS or Apple right in doing what they do, btw. They lock systems down to prevent average users from fucking up their systems with stuff they download from the internet.
Forcing a specific browser (see Apple just enforcing it all be safari) to prevent the user getting around security checks you can build relying on that one browser is just one step of that.
And every time someone blindly shoots themselves in the foot with a tool then tries to blame the company for what they themselves did wrong, the number used in meetings to justify more programmer time spent on locking it all down goes up by 1.
Well, my default browser is Firefox and
EdgeRemover(oops, misremembered the name) MSEdgeRedirect (which is FOSS of course, would not install such thing otherwise) does work, in a way – all Help pages, Start Menu searches etc. get redirected to Firefox and DuckDuckGo. I thought it would prevent Edge from opening at all. I don’t think it’s a browser hijacker.Okay, the company is using ESET’s highest tier and the computers are remotely managed so I’m not sure I would see detection notifications.
textbook browser hijacker
Is your textbook from the 1990s? Pretty sure modern malware is way more stealthy and not at all obvious.
And I’m pretty sure you have no idea what you’re talking about, and I have a career with this stuff.
Figure it out yourself now smart ass.
I dread it every time I open it by accident.
Task manager was faster than waiting + dialogs.Well, Task Manager nor attempting to delete the executable normally helped in my case. Power deleting Edge (including WebView) is obviously a bad idea but faster than finding whatever mistake I made that led to this behavior. I can afford to do dumb stuff because the job is temporary, and I never downloaded any malware (according to VirusTotal) that would cause further problems.
Be aware that the new explorer.exe seems to be dependant on some parts on edge.
I believe I saw flashes of edge in windows explorer during a crashThat’s exactly what Microsoft did in the 1990s after an antitrust lawsuit for hindering free browser selection: integrated Internet Explorer into Explorer to have an excuse for having it preinstalled.
The EU is taking similar steps but I tgink Edge WebView will stay essential. Removing it on a laptop broke biometrics (aka Windows Hello: fingerprint sensor and face recognition) and I had to use a restore point. Seems sketchy to use a browser engine for essential security features – at this point, I would hope I had triggered some OS tamper-detection because the alternative is an OS whose login system is infected with an unpopular browser not because it enhances security but out of spite, and I don’t think exploiting legal loopholes leads to most secure solutions.
The ads are definitely garbage, but the respawning window is something very wrong. Are you sure you dont have some kind of malware that is respawning the window?
Yeah this sounds like OP has malware on the system, definitely.
It’s the cleanest Windows install I’ve ever done, less than a month old, and there is world-renowned, enterprise-level antivirus software running. Malware is pretty much out of the question.
I did install EdgeRemover but it apparently does not quite work.
So yeah, it is caused by a kind of malware, which you pay Microsoft for. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other choice due to our required software.
world-renowned, enterprise-level antivirus software running
lol. better just use defender next time.
edit: or not use windows.
Yes, I use Linux on my personal machines, and I’m not advocating for Windows (in case you haven’t noticed). I can also assure you, the AV has better hit rate and user rating than Defender.
Looks like it doesn’t since your computer is clearly infected.
Infected by Microsoft.
Basically no modern malware will ever do this, lol. Every black hat just wants to make money by pushing ads, holding data ransom or stealing passwords, as stealthily as possible. Users are already suffficiently anmoyed by corpos, freeware software vendors and other users sharing the same network, the era of purely mildly annoying malware ended in the 2000s. There is no executable I haven’t checked with VirusTotal, and most are FOSS. Firefox once did something similar on me (infinite blank tabs) but it turned out I had misconfigured it to try to call itself to open PDFs.
Microsoft didn’t create your issue, you did by trying to delete an essential part of the OS. Try deleting essential files in Linux and see how well that goes!
I guess you would blame Microsoft too.
Joke’s on me, I already have (accidentally 😅) deleted essential Linux files before. Fun times. I knew I was to blame though, it was a learning experience.
Maybe I’ll try to figure out what exactly I did wrong so I learn more than just “don’t poke” (which I wouldn’t stop doing anyway).
Enterprise IT infrastructure admin here, I’ve imaged thousands of windows laptops over a decade and dealt with Edge since it was implemented, never seen anything like this. I’m sure you’re confident in your abilities but you messed something up real bad or have malware of some kind. No question about it, this is not typical for any version of Edge.
messed something up real bad
You see me power-deleting Edge (including WebView) in the video, which is obviously a bad idea. This is a somewhat experimental setup I have so I don’t mind screwing things up a little bit.
malware
Unlikely. I follow very strict precautions. I cannot afford to have malware on top of my existing computer trouble.
so I don’t mind screwing things up a little bit.
Which you clearly did, and are trying to blame Edge. There’s plenty of things to shit on Edge for but user error is not one of them.
This is actual malware behavior though, not Microsoft’s usual “pls use Edge” shtick. If it’s not malware, something has still gone very wrong.
I don’t disagree with you. I could have still messed up in a subtle way but at least the consequences don’t seem to be too serious.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s (third party) malware (that is, not by me or Microsoft) for another reason: viruses and trojans are not what they used to be. Unlike the 1990s, you won’t find much modern malware that does nothing but annoys the user (corporations, other users and freeware vendors do it plenty). People do it fir profit and they make adware, ransomware and cryptostealers, not some script kiddie’s batch file in the Startup folder that opens all executables in System32 simultaneously.
When Firefox started opening several blank tabs every second, I immediately knew it wasn’t malware but a misconfiguration: turns out it was trying to open a PDF in itself. I think this is another little mistake I made.
I think this is another little mistake I made.Like not listening to people that are telling you to stop acting like you know what you’re doing?
Hey! The stakes are low and the consequences are mild annoyance at worst (unless I’ve downloaded actual malware, which is unlikely because I follow precautions). Yes, I mess around with systems I shouldn’t but that’s just another learning experience.
Along with my personal ones I have a few windows 10/11 machines at work I manage and haven’t seen this happen, where the window just instantly re-opens like that.
Have you tried clearing the edge appdata folders to fully reset all the settings? Maybe some setting got screwed up.
Also maybe AV going haywire as a cause, lots of third party AV likes to do all kinds of weird stuff with your browsers. Windows defender is the go-to best option for windows these days, so if it turns out to be your third party AV you can pretty safely just get rid of it and switch back to defender.
I haven’t seen this behavior either but companies do partial “feature” rollouts all the time so I assume this is something like that.
“which you pay Microsoft for”
No. That’s not an Edge feature, that’s your shit that you broke yourself. I’m running five computers with Windows 11 and none of them have this behaviour, it’s not Microsoft doing partial rollouts as that would be all over tech news.
Don’t ask for opinions if you’re going to argue with everyone that clearly understand things better than you do.
Delete everything on your computer, do a full format of your hard drive, change all the passwords that computer could have had access to, don’t try to delete Edge from your next install of Windows as it’s a necessary feature and you just got pwnd for being an idiot that couldn’t understand that.
That’s clearly misconfiguration, not malware. Do you think modern malware would do obvious shit like this? I checked all installers on VirusTotal and most were FOSS, too.
Anyway, I know removing Edge can do weird stuff, it disabled biometric login on another PC.
The computer is not high-stakes, I don’t do personal stuff there and this is mild annoyance at worst. I’ll have ESET check the drive and reset Edge-related config.
Looks like a known issue https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect/issues/315
Thanks. I should have checked earlier before making a fool of myself. A lesson for me, I guess.
