Am I being hacked? [Solved...I think]

Wonderland

I’m a lifelong Mac user who just started using Windows and my computer did not come with a way to connect to WiFi so I had to purchase a USB WiFi connector. I noticed later it came from China. When my computer is asleep, I hear my external hard drive churning away and I don’t have back up software or anything (although I know I should, but I back up manually important things to my cloud accounts.) Why is my external hard drive working when my computer is asleep? And now I disconnected it from the computer and my computer started making churning noises like it’s working on something but I’m not doing anything....

dragotx

It's probably a virus scan or system defrag running.  Windows has several utiities like that which are scheduled to run deep night when most people are not using their computer.

Wonderland

Never mind, I think it’s Norton Utilities. I don’t use virus protection on my Mac so I’m guessing that’s the issue...

Wonderland

dragotx said:

It's probably a virus scan or system defrag running.  Windows has several utiities like that which are scheduled to run deep night when most people are not using their computer.

Yes, I guess you posted while I was typing. Thanks. I think that’s it. Now I hope I didn’t screw things up by disconnecting my external hard drive in the middle of a scan...

nonesuch00

Funny I sometimes hear my computer churning with Chrome or other browser running it seems to be some sort of errant advertising in some tabs (you know how Flash ads used to be really bad for that but I have flash disabled plus most ads are now just html5/video/webgl). Otherwise the only things that make my computer groan like that are DAZ Studio, render in Blender, or Unity.