Yeah! No Kidding, I really feel like I just managed a small victory over very complicated computer software. 

I have not been here on my Blog for a very long time. In the interim, someone compromised my Windows logon session, took over my browser, and searched for something I eventually identified as a Bitcoin wallet. 

Way back in the early Bitcoin days, I bought one Bitcoin for $150. It languished for more than a year and dropped to $125, so I sold it and never bought any more Bitcoins. YES! I know if I had kept that one Bitcoin, I could now sell it for more than $60,000. As wife #2 used to say:  "GO KNOW!

I submitted multiple cases to my Virus Prevention Program, Bitdefender, and they could never find any evidence of a penetrator.

The invasions continued off and on and became more sophisticated. They began gaining control and displayed a small page that said: "Your Application is being updated; do not alter your browser." I promptly clicked the "X" in the upper-right corner to close the page. It closed and said the update would be postponed.

I quickly logged off.

After a few invasions that Bitdefender couldn't identify, I created a completely different user account on my Windows 11 system and am now in the tedious task of moving or copying dozens of things to my new account. I am HAPPY TO SAY that I have never been invaded while logged into the new account. BUT invasions do continue in my old account. I have to log on there to find various things.

Various tedious things did keep working while using my new account, at least until the big Outlook 365 outage, which I use. I survived the outage, but now I find that many things that worked in my new account have to be reconfigured to access old data. A big one is the "Favorites" entry that has a vast collection of URLs. Suddenly, I have to log in to old accounts to access my old bookmarks.

This requires remembering or recovering old user IDs and old passwords. This is level two hell! Level 1 (the worst) hell I am still facing was buying a Samsung S26 Ultra and taking my S10 to Best Buy to have the Geek Squad move me over. I tried doing that myself with a Samsung S25 Ultra last year, and I created such a mess that I took the S25 Ultra back to T-Mobile and had them take it back, which cost me $75 in restocking fees.

This year, my bank updated their phone app to require a newer version of the Operating system that would never be available on my S20, so I bought the S26 Ultra, and the Geek Squad did a partially good job moving me over. Google Authenticator came over just fine. Microsoft Authenticator had multiple missing passwords and wanted me to scan a QR code that I was to get from my SharePoint site. I never found that and had to fix several entries painfully. Most of that hell is over now.

Then along came the Outlook 365 failure that shook the world. The main thing I noticed was that I was told to re-enter my credentials for all three of my Gmail accounts, and none of those responded to my attempts. Fortunately, those are all working again without me re-entering my credentials.

BUT many things that were working seamlessly no longer work, and I have to guess how to access things from my compromised account in my new user ID. Occasionally, I log back in and find something like a Library that I can copy the contents onto paper and recreate in the new account. 

This afternoon, my default Edge browser account lost track of my logon user ID, and I had to go back and look. Then I had to return to my new account and try to enter those credentials in Edge. I finally got that working too, so I decided I'd come here, after a long absence, and tell the story.

Clearly, only one account has been compromised, and I'm thinking of disabling my old account once I get everything moved over here.

At least I don't have to do a factory reset on my entire Windows 11 machine and recreate all my accounts from scratch. Just getting all of the email accounts added to my Android version of Outlook, which has no limit on how many accounts you can add, while the Windows version is limited to 10 accounts. For most of them, I have forgotten the passwords, and I have been recreating them and writing them on a notepad that sits on the printer on my computer desk. Yes, I know, I should not write passwords down this way, but this has been hell. It took me almost an hour to get my password control program to sync with our other computers because it uses a free Dropbox account. It turned out I have three free Dropbox accounts, and the configuration in my password control program didn't tell me which one I was using. I fnally guessed my way out of that one and got it working.

OK, enough is enough.