Weird thing happened on Galaxy A51 Android.

[Susan Calvin]

I did a virus scan immediately after the weird thing and it says everything's fine, but it was weird and I wish I could be sure everything's fine and I'd like to know what the heck caused it. Maybe this has happened to somebody else?

I saw a notification that said something along the lines of play Royal Match, which was odd because I have almost all notifications turned off. I thought it might be from the latest game I installed, seeing as how they are so incestuous with promoting each other, and I looked at that one intending to turn off notifications, but it said no permissions given or required.

Then I foolishly clicked on it and some website or something that I foolishly forgot the name of opened. I closed immediately, of course. However, it was too late. From my point of view anyway. The notification area started showing a download, which I tried to cancel but it wouldn't, and then it said installing. Oh great, I thought.

While it was supposedly installing, I deleted the Royal Match that was already installed, and it did not show up again. Since the notification was showing it as a download, I looked for something that might have shown up in downloads and new files, but there was nothing new since several days ago.

I checked apps to see if Royal Match had shown up again, or if anything new had shown up. Nothing.

So, anyway, I ran a scan with Bit Defender which said everything was fine. Being paranoid, I'm going to download some other security apps and run them.

If anything like this has ever happened to you, or if you've heard about a thing like this and have an idea as to what the heck it is and how worried I should be, I would appreciate any information or speculation..

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. I recently had to deal with a "captchasafe" malware virus.

The virus scan did not pick it up. This malware embeds itself in my Chrome Browser settings and gives itself permission to send lots of nogus notifications which, if clicked on, would further open my phone to worse problems. Anyways, I found the captchasafe website in my permitted datasharing list. Once removed, the problem went away.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

2. I paid the annual fee for Geek Squad help

Someone came to the house and found no virus. Eventually we brought our device to the store. They sent it out. Then we were told a virus was found to have interfered with virus detection app.

[Tetrachloride]

3. please use the browser called Brave.

enable stuff in settings or global settings

[Susan Calvin]

4. I do use Brave, along with others

I'm kind of like, one browser, one category of uses. I used EFFs Cover Your Tracks on all of them, and found out some of the ones that tout their privacy come with default settings that don't protect any such thing. It was quite enlightening.

However, this did not come from a browser. It came from my notifications, the things you see if you swipe down from the top of the home screen.

[Tetrachloride]

5. Interesting. i will keep in mind

[Susan Calvin]

6. Thanks for the moral support, everybody.

I scanned it with everything I could find that I recognized as being legit. Malwarebytes seemed the most thorough. That one took nearly an hour. Everything said I didn't have any issues, and I would certainly assume that anything that showed up in notifications would be from an app that was already installed, but it's still annoying and puzzling. I guess my next thing will be to go through the apps one by one and see if anything has notifications turned on that I didn't realize had notifications turned on. I hate it when stuff like this happens.

[Susan Calvin]

7. I've come up with two theories.

Theory one is that a pre-installed game that had never said a word to me before all of a sudden decided to send this notification. I checked all my games, and the ones that I had installed myself were not allowed notifications, but a few of the pre-installed ones had notifications allowed but had never bugged me. When I install something myself the first thing I do is turn off notifications unless I want them, but I hadn't thought about any of the pre-installed stuff unless it brought itself to my attention.

Theory two is that some hacker has come up with a way to send you fake notifications. That is a scary thought. However, I can't think of any way that I would have given anyone an opening to do that. I do try to be careful.

Every virus and malware app that I ran said I was fine, but I'm going to check and see if there's any such thing as a web scan for phones like there is for computers.

[Susan Calvin]

8. I'm now looking for an app to monitor network traffic.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[Susan Calvin]

9. Okay, I found a combination of things that makes me happy, relatively.

If anybody is interested.

I was already using Duck Duck Go's local VPN even though it took me until today to realize that's what it was. I installed another program that had a local VPN this morning, but it turned out that VPN interfered with using Samsung Smart View to cast my exercise classes to my TV. So I turned that one off and that's when I realized that the Duck Duck Go one was a VPN that did not interfere with the casting.

I still kept the app that had the VPN though, because it enables you to selectively turn off all internet access for apps and several other useful things. It is called Netguard. I can't find out how to turn the VPN back off when it's enabled, so I guess I'm going to have to uninstall it and reinstall it.

I also got Glasswire, which I've had on my Windows computer for quite a while and did not realize it had an Android app. As soon as I installed it I was able to see all the apps that had accessed the internet recently and how much data they used. I didn't see anything suspicious.

I had one called Wi-FiAnalyzer that I just uninstalled because it insists on having location access, but I'm going to try to find something similar that shows all the Wi-Fi devices on your network. Or maybe just reinstall that one and use it occasionally and then turn location back off. I'd rather have one that doesn't require location permission at all.

So I'm sort of happy now. I'm never completely happy about security on my phone or computer.

[Susan Calvin]

10. Okay, I figured out why I couldn't turn off the VPN for Netguard.

It has to be turned on for it to do its other stuff. Maybe I'll keep it and remember to turn it off when I want to cast to the tv.