Hackers-red.gif file appearing after windows update

Question

I pressed 'update and shut down' as normal when an update appears. The next day when I turned on my laptop, in the center of my desktop it had a file entitled 'hackers-red.gif' with a black box as its file picture. The file showed as having been downloaded at the same time as I did the 'update and shutdown'.

Is my computer under threat? My virus scans didn't pick up on any threats.

Has anyone else had this?

Answer 1

Hi, I am Dave, I will help you with this.

There is no previous reports of this type of thing happening, however that file ended up on your Desktop, it was not caused by a Windows update, but it may indicate you have malware on your PC.

Do not open that file, just delete it, then open Defender or your preferred anti-virus and run a full offline scan, does that scan come back clear?

Answer 2

I deleted it. Neither the scan before nor the scan after detected anything.

I haven't downloaded anything recently and it is very interesting that it showed the same time as the the time that I did the update.

Is there any other way of telling if my computer has been hacked?

Thank you

Answer 3

If your PC was hacked, you would see some indication in your scans, if they came back clear, then you have nothing to worry about.

Do you use a cloud service like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive...etc. to sync your files?

Answer 4

Not actively, but I think I have them

Answer 5

It is very hard to pin down the source of that image, is possible that file appeared from some online sync, I have seen that happening before, it may have been from some advert or website you previously visited, once your scans came back clean, you have nothing to worry about.