dhsmith13

I understand that fully diagnosing the problem would be prohibitively expensive. I think my best bet is to do a full backup of the documents folder on this computer, re-image the hard drive and re-install everything. There has been other strange behavior that I've reported to Microsoft, HP and Malwarebytes (see support ticket 3390259) and none of the scans that have been run have found anything. So I can't prove that there is malware on this computer but I am not comfortable using it (in its current state) for much besides playing games. Do you think I have a reasonable plan? Is there anything else I should do?

There is no VBS file to upload. The extension of the files is .vbs, but the content is HTML as you point out. The HTML didn't look like VBScript to the Windows Script Host so it flagged an error in line 1. Although there probably isn't an easy answer, I want to know how the files got there. And who created the scheduled tasks named adweb, adweb2 and adwebbackup? (After I renamed the files, I kept getting Windows Script Host messages that the original files were missing. That's when I looked at the scheduled tasks.) The files backup1.vbs and 1.vbs had timestamps of 12:37 PM on 3/18/2021. I was logged in to the Windows laptop but working on a different computer at this time.

I located the scheduled task that is attempting to run backup1.vbs (see the screenshot below). I have renamed the files backup1.vbs and 1.vbs, and disabled the scheduled tasks. We'll see what happens.

I'm getting error messages from the script c:\Users\Public\backup1.vbs. When I looked at this script, it appears to be from Malwarebytes. I was not allowed to attach backup1.vbs so I copied it to backup1.vbs.txt and uploaded that. Is this a Malwarebytes file? Why is it running? And what should I do about it? Rename it? Delete it? backup1.vbs.txt