Desktop refreshed itself and now has lots of adware/malware installed.

[Aeron15]

Hi guys, this isn't necessarily a surface related problem.

My dad's desktop rebooted itself while it was scanning using the mcafee. He said he left the PC for an amount of time and when he came back, the PC was refreshing itself. When it came back on, all the programs he had installed are gone including MS Office. And then he said the only thing he did was download Google chrome and then turned off the PC. Now his browsers are hijacked by sweet-page, he has reg clean pro and suptab. and other stuff installed including mypc backup.

He can't exactly tell me what happened last night but he said he was playing farmville when this happened. He is also the type of guy who would click any link his friends posted on facebook or ads from facebook/farmville with the reasoning "Hey, it's from facebook, surely this can be trusted!" He denies ever clicking anything last night.

So can anyone explain what happened, what could have caused the PC to refresh itself? What could've caused the adwares to install themselves after the refresh when he only purportedly installed google chrome after the refresh. Update: He may have clicked a random link that said Download when he searched for Google Chrome.

 

[leeshor]

That "random" link was likely the cause of the problems but I have yet to read about any malware that will do a refresh. There is some malware that will hide everything though I haven't seen that one in years. Has he tried booting in safe mode?

My suggestion would be to try running Malwarebytes in safe mode to see what happens, A refresh doesn't just happen.

 

[GreyFox7]

Does another Refresh bring it back to normalcy or still with the malware?

 

[Aeron15]

That "random" link was likely the cause of the problems but I have yet to read about any malware that will do a refresh. There is some malware that will hide everything though I haven't seen that one in years. Has he tried booting in safe mode?

My suggestion would be to try running Malwarebytes in safe mode to see what happens, A refresh doesn't just happen.

I see. So those new malwares were from his random clicking after the refresh but how it refreshed itself is still a mystery. He hasn't tried booting in safe mode. I have refreshed his PC again hoping all those extra stuff downloaded will disappear.

Does another Refresh bring it back to normalcy or still with the malware?

I uninstalled them through Control Panel before I refreshed his PC again so I can't tell. But when I did refresh, they didn't come back.