On Saturday, I was browsing a web page when a popup box that looked like a Windows 7 UAC box showed up (funny, since I'm running Windows 10), saying that the Windows firewall detected a problem and I need to download a utility to remove my problem. Do I wanted to install? I clicked No, and moved along (I knew it was a pop up and not a legitimate alert).
Saturday afternoon, my brain had an itch, I properly shouldn't have interacted with the pop up in any way. Clicking Yes or No wouldn't matter, it could probably infect my machine. I went to Google and did a search. Can malware do damage under a local user account? I found a Information Security Stack Exchange page that said malware may try to exploit the OS or software to get Administrator rights to cause the most damage, but it could still cause damage using a local account.
Here is my setup:
Windows 10 with an Administrator and Local user account (99% of the time this is the account I use).
I always make sure to install the latest Windows 10 updates and run virus scans weekly in addition to weekly backups.
The only non-Microsoft applications I have are, 7-Zip, Firefox, KeePass, Malwarebytes and Python 3.12. All of them were download directly from the official website and installed, and currently up to date.
Saturday afternoon I did the following:
From the Administrator account:
Went to Update and Security > Checked for updates > Ran a Full System scan > 0 threats found.
Ran Malwarebytes Free > Checked for updates > Ran a scan > 0 threats found.
Repeated the process again Sunday (including checking for updates). Again 0 threats. Just for reassurance, I'll probably run a 3rd scan. So far, I haven't seen anything unusual, and Windows 10 seems to be running smoothly.
Questions:
Do I need to be concerned?
Could malware have slipped by and go undetected after two scans?
Is it possible, under a local account, for malware to embed itself to cause damage when starting up my computer?
