I only work in IT for a small company, but I do have an interest in security. I was called to troubleshoot HR’s laptop as it was lagging with just about every process.

None of the normal stuff raised any red flags. Task manager reported that none of the resources were being pushed even close to their limits. Plenty of storage space, ram usage is low, all that jazz. I booted into safe mode, and the problem seemingly went away. Then it was mentioned that HR also had trouble accessing a specific thing on a banking site. I checked the failed request and there was no response.

I decided to run a McAfee virus scan(just because it was what was on the computer), and nothing was detected. But after the scan finished, I tried to access the specific thing on the banking site again and it worked perfectly.

I’m concerned what is on the PC is a virus. I know there are ways to hide what a virus is doing from the user, including reporting false utilization info. I don’t know everything that is and isn’t possible, but I could see a case where a virus detects that it’s being noticed/scanned and stops doing what it was meant to do.

The fact the banking site’s specific page worked only after scanning, and how the PC only stopped lagging after it went in and out of safe mode makes me suspicious of the real cause of those issues. It’s possible I’m connecting dots that aren’t there, but you could argue that’s what intuition is.