Hi All,
I believe my internet Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 has been compromised. Emails have disappeared in recent days; my chromium browser started wiggling up and down for several minutes, not vibrating, but moving up and down. And just half an hour ago, a rectangle appeared in the middle of the screen, somewhat similar to the rectangle in the picture below (i.e. the rectangle next to the terminal in the picture, except that it was solid and in the colors of my Ubuntu 20.04 OS, i.e. orange and purple. The terminal itself did not appear.) I could not take a screenshot of the rectangle as it flashed on the screen very briefly, but I immediately logged off and will reinstall Ubuntu on the Lenovo. In the meantime, I am using this windows laptop that I have sitting around as a back-up.
I am by no means an IT or hacking expert, so I can only guess how I was hacked based on the rectangle, which I believe may indicate that a remote connection was established, in other words, that I was hacked through remote desktop access.
My question to you all: how can I prevent remote desktop access to my Lenovo laptop in the future? Are there any features I need to remove from the OS through the terminal? Could my laptop be hooked up to a server, even though I have no server set up myself? Can I check via the terminal if that is the case?
Just in case you wonder: I periodically check my settings through the settings button on the top right side to make sure that the sharing button and sharing features are set to off and they always are. So whatever is going on is going on in the background and not visible to me, except for that strange rectangle that flashed up in the middle of my screen.
I connect to the internet via an ethernet cable. There are no no wifi or bluetooth modules in my Lenovo laptop.
I hope I will get some serious suggestions and would like to thank you for your time.
P.S. Just to clarify: the picture below is *not* from my laptop. I just plucked it off the internet to give you an idea of the type of rectangle that appeared in the middle of my screen.
https://c-nergy.be/blog/wp-content/g...sh-xrdp-23.png