I'm a computer enthusiast and tinkerer, but I've never encountered anything like this and don't know what to do.
So I signed up for a newer VPN company. I didn't know who ran it, but thought there would be no harm. They would have gotten my real dynamic non-rotating IP from my ISP.
I've also been working on some open source projects related to making it harder to track people online.
I have used vibe coding, which is a large attack surface (because of npm/supply chain attacks/etc), and I use tor extensively.
The firmware attack seemed to occur a few days ago: I had previously purchased an old fashioned CD of a Lana del Rey album, Honeymoon. I lost the CD and my jogging MP3 player went haywire so I tossed it. I really wanted to hear a specific Lana del Rey song, so I use a torrent program and downloaded Lana del Rey Honeymoon Japanese verision, which was in flac format, and played it using VLC.
Around that time, my router stopped working. I reset it, still didn't work. I have the sort of router that allows a hard reset to reset the firmware. I did that, still broken. I was able to access uboot. I downloaded the router firmware and loaded it back up in uboot. It worked. Seemed like everything was good!
I decided to start cleaning. I come back from cleaning and go to my computer and begin to type. A few things happen. First, some of my keys, one entire row actually, completely stop working. Other keys press more than one key. It also appears the shift key is being held down, no matter what. Sometimes things go to all capital letters and I don't know why.
More detail:
spoiler
I've been having glitches or hacks quite often in the past 2 months. I have no idea if it's some clever cyberpunk, if it's a hacking gang that ran the sketchy VPN as a honeypot to try to target people, if it's government... I have no idea who the fuck is doing it. I also have not always been sure if it's hacking: clamscan and rkhunter never showed anything, but sometimes I had unusual things happening that seemed like noisy unsophisticated attacks. By noisy, I mean if I was using Tor Browser, the window might switch to my calendar or open my contacts. These were things that could have just a technical glitch and not hacking. I wasn't sure. Switching distros was on the to do list, although I believed that a smart hacker wouldn't be so noisy and a distro reinstall might not stop a great hacker, plus technical glitches aren't always hacking, so I delayed doing it.
Also, at one point in the past few months, I was using a Kali VM and connected to a Whonix gateway (both using KVM) with full laptop power when suddenly, the laptop just powered off. The laptop wasn't hot or overheated, but my thinking was "some component probably got too hot."
So back to the more recent past: when my keyboard stopped working properly after playing this Lana del Rey song, I rebooted. The problem still happened, an entire row of keys didn't work and some keys were outputting more than 1 letter and everything was in Caps with shift held down. I was also wondering about electrical surges. I plugged in a different USB keyboard and it had the same problems: it was like shift and caps lock were being held down, and that keyboard works fine.
I disassembled the laptop after, disconnecting the battery, put it back together. The problem still exists. At this point I am thinking it's either hardware failure or an advanced firmware attack. I reflashed the bios and same problem still occurs. I can't type anything with or without a different keyboard attached via USB. I also go into the bios and the keyboard problem happens in the bios too, with or without a USB keyboard attached, so this isn't like a compromised kernel image or something like that, this has infected me at the lowest levels or it's hardware failure.
Here's where the fuckery really happens. So I decide the laptop is fried and I will try to either throw it out or get the board repaired. I take out the hard drive, put it a USB enclosure, and then boot a second shitty laptop (Shit Laptop) and attach the USB from Good Laptop. Things are working fine at first. The shit laptop is NOT connected to the internet at this time, from my memory, which may be a bit hazy.
Then I play the same Flac Lana del Rey album that I downloaded via torrent (using the Good Laptop USB-attached hard drive on shit laptop) since I hadn't heard it enough and like the album. And suddenly: same fucking thing starts to happen. All my keys are capitalized, no matter what I do, I can't type certain things, keys on the keyboard won't work. I freak out and pull out the attached USB off the shit laptop and reboot.
The keyboard problem doesn't seem to survive the reboot, but it could be that the attack was never supposed to be noisy and that it just accidentally seemed noisy on the good laptop. I am typing on shit laptop now. The keys are working... but it could be infected with something. I have no idea.
More detail:
spoiler
So at this point, I don't know what happened. I don't know if this is highly advanced malware hiding in a flac that got executed by VLC when playing on both machines, but can somehow hack device firmware (since on Good Laptop the malware or hardware failure is persistent). It seems so unlikely that's the problem, especially when my router also got hacked in the same 2 hour period.
It's also possible someone has been hacking me for a while, I didn't realize how bad it was, then they hacked my router and then they hacked my laptop firmware somehow and the malware is so advanced it transferred to the harddrive firmware and tried to infect "shit laptop" after I plugged it in.
I know this whole thing sounds crazy. I don't consider myself a hacker, I'm not good enough to be a real hacker, but I experiment with coding and sometimes stuff that may be gray stuff, just experimenting to see how code works. But plenty of people do that. Probably half the people on Lemmy have done that. I've also never hacked to steal from people or defraud anyone. I'm not someone who could pentest in any meaningful way or even in a dumb way and in some ways I barely know anything about computers compared to people who are good. I can't really code.
I'm not sure what to do. This is such a confusing attack, with so many parts, or it's in my head and I'm just dumb, and I'm still not even sure it's an attack, but it sure seemed to transfer across laptops. I also can't be sure that this wasn't a targeted advanced adversary attack and if it was, then just connecting to my ISP is a risk, because even if my IP is dynamic, someone good enough could hack the ISP and figure out what the DHCP provisioning is. I also did get new DHCP after my router was hacked.
I'm still using the same router. I also have a lot computer gear. If this is a firmware attack that's been going on for a few months, or maybe even longer, then perhaps the answer is to throw out all of my gear. It just would be so expensive to do. But it may be more expensive if someone is hacking me and waiting to do something really bad. The motive may not be economic and it could be government just wanting to monitor me because of some of the open source stuff I've been working on (that's anti-tracking in nature), but that seems so unlikely, and I don't think I would ever know if someone that advanced were doing that. At least with the government, they probably wouldn't be trying to steal from me. Most hacks are motivated by money, but most hacks don't affect firmware.
I had stopped working on the anti-tracking open source project I started a few months ago because I was worried it was the reason my system screen seemed to be doing strange things. It was novel in some ways, but I don't even know how anyone would know I was working on it. But then I started working on it again a bit a month ago, got hacked again, stopped working on it. It's probably not related to that, I don't think I'm that important or good or anything, but it was sort of different. I'd rather not describe the project. I hadn't beta tested it.
I'm also financially in a somewhat iffy place. I'm not homeless, and I get by, but... just replacing everything or throwing things out is hard.
I also can't rule out that this is somehow craziness, but when I plugged in the enclosed Good laptop USB into the shit USB laptop and the exact same keyboard problem started happening, that was some crazy fuckery right there. When I say exact thing, I mean Caps Lock did nothing, but the keys were always capitalized, shift was always on, so I couldn't do 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc, instead it would come out like !@#$%^ etc.
I know Lemmy has some smart computer people. What is your advice? Am I being hacked? Is this craziness? Is this a hack for financial motive? Could it be something else? What should I do? Am I just crazy?
I also may have pissed off a genius-level hacker who I was chatting with who I only chatted with via Tor and I thought there was no chance in hell they could track me. It's probably not that because even a genius-level hacker would have a hard time tracking someone that way.
I've been hacked before with viruses in virtual environments and never cared (since it was with VMs I could just toss), but I've never encountered firmware level malware. I don't think there's flac attacks on vlc and the Lana del Rey songs are doing this. But I also have no idea what the fuck is going on. Every guess seems crazy, every theory seems implausible.
This whole thing also sounds fucking nuts. I read what I'm writing and think "This sure seems crazy as fuck." I don't have the money to figure out if it's a real firmware attack. It would be so expensive to probe every chip and I don't understand firmware level malware.
What do I do?