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Windows 10 shows Linkedin Learning Ads on Login Screen (infosec.pub)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

First off: Can't switch to Linux, Windows is a work requirement. Please spare me.

With that out of the way, here's my problem:

Since 2-3 days I've been seeing ads disguised as a minimized video player popup on my Windows 10 Login Screen .

Initially I thought I might have been watching something on youtube and forgot to close the tab and it autoplayed in the background until reaching this stuff by chance; but that turned out not to be the case (I'm also using Firefox exclusively, which I thought wouldn't integrate with Windows, but I wasn't 100% sure on that end).

I tried to research this a bit, but the only similar case I found was in an old reddit thread saying that some Windows update installed the LinkedIn App for them, which is not the case here.

Antivirus (Bit Defender) and Malwarebytes both give me a clean report.

So I did some more digging and right click that thing with my firewall set to deny all to figure out where this is taking me, and surprise...

There's a total of 100 connection attempts from Windows Search to around 10 different IP addresses, all of which belong to Microsoft.

I have not installed any updates in the last 14 days, no new software, and have not changed any system settings.

What did change is that I am currently not in China, where I normally live, but am on a business trip to Malaysia, where a bunch of services that are blocked in China might be accessible, and are now splicing in those (somewhat disguised) ads.

Does this happen to anyone else, and if so, do you have an idea how to get rid of it?

Thanks a lot in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Ads on a login screen? That's disturbing.

For people automatically saying to switch to Linux, it's because they have never had a job in tech to know it doesn't work that way, and have never worked in production. There are several industries where if you don't run Windows you can't have a job because all of the software is only designed to run on Windows in their industry.