This may be a silly question, and this might be the wrong place to post it.

[sknight]

My apologies if that is the case. Hello All, I've noticed something very odd on my Home-built Windows 10 Pro 64-bit system, build 1703.608. It's a core i7 4790K, ASUS MB with 16GB RAM, etc. I run a 980ti video card. This is basically my gaming rig. That being said, I've noticed some odd things recently and it got me wondering...

Can your entire OS and system be turned into a Virtual Machine by Malware?

I don't ask this lightly. My rig took an inordinately long period of time to start up this passed Sunday, and I've noticed now that I have what appears to be a new entry in the File Explorer view. On the left pane, where it shows your drives and file structure, I now have an additional "Desktop" entry. This has a dropdown arrow, and my entire computer system resides under that Desktop drop down. As in "This PC", my user Folder, and everything else folds up under that.
If I'm being foolish and this is a normal view for Windows 10, please forgive me, I've just never noticed it being that way before. I use my computer often, and believe I would've noticed this long before now, if it was a standard situation.
Can anyone please advise?

There is more to this story. I've run Malwarebytes, and other tools on my system, and nothing has been found. I'm not certain what the implications of my entire system being viritualized might mean. I can't imagine it being good though.

Anyway, I've had a couple of instances since last Sunday where for no explicable reason, my entire internet connection dropped out momentarily and came back. This affected nothing else on our network but my wired PC. This has not happened since, but I'm worried that it might again.

I should point out that I had the bad version of CCCleaner that was known to contain malware. I've since uninstalled it, but I'm not naive enough to believe that cleaned out whatever malicious payload it carried. Any advice in that area, would be great as well.

Thank you in advance for your assistance and insight,

Silver

 

[michalrz]

IIRC the CCleaner virus didn't run its main payload because it was meant for later.
But, yeah, probably compromised somehow already.
Your system did not become a VM, you'd see evidence of this in device manager. However it may not be your own computer anymore.
The file tree beginning at root=desktop can be also a Win10 bug (sorry guys, I see and can't unsee them).
Could you slave your drive? As in,connect it to a known good system and run antirus tools from within a healthy Windows install?

 

[sknight]

Michael,
Thanks so much for your response. I guess I can try that.
I appreciate your response.

Regards,

Silver

 

[Biznatch]

If your system had a VM running, you would see a process running in the task manager (Or even better, resource manager) with the cpu/memory resources allocated to it. You can also check the network tab for excessive in/outbound traffic to unkown IPs.

But my money is on a failing HDD if you have slowness during boot/normal operation and your scanners aren't coming up with anything malicious. You can check the event viewer and see if there are any errors there about bad sectors or any other errors that might shed a light on what is slowing the system down.