Sounds like the problem exists between keyboard and chair.

Executing strange binary files from untrusted sources could ruin your day on Mac and Linux as well. It is only less common because market share is so small compared to Windows, and as such these systems are less of a target.

How do you establish that a binary is trustworthy?

I know what I do, I generally try to find user reviews, but someone had to install it first.

You can upload the binary to virustotal and see if it got flagged.

Oh, that’s an interesting tool. Thanks.

Just as a heads up to anyone out there, if you ever get infected run Malwarebytes (free) first and that should probably fix your woes or else you can download bitdefender (also free) and run that. I see a lot of people using norton or whatever else and imo they're all just a waste of resources and time.

I personally just uninstall Malwarebytes and bitdefender after I clean up and make sure windows defenders up and running and I'm ready to download all kinds of shit off the internet again.

I think the best way to find niche software on windows is to search for open source alternatives.

Making a system restore point from time to time can help greatly too on windows! (make sure you change the setting so that it doesn't delete your old system restore points due to low disk space making the whole thing useless)

I think that if you have malware, then formatting of hard drive is minimum of what should be done.

I would not assume that malware is actually purged, and unpacking backup archive and running script to reinstall software is not so troublesome (assuming that you have backups and script to automate installing your programs, but if you are on HN then you probably have it)

Well, I normally do :P But this was a fairly fresh install, so I didn't set it up yet.

I use Clonezilla for backups.