Forced Windows 10 upgrade proves quite helpful

Jun 7, 2016 05:10 GMT  ·  By

The Internet has been flooded with reports about forced Windows 10 upgrades lately, and there’s even a petition that calls for an investigation of Microsoft because of its aggressive strategy for the new OS, but it turns out that having your PC upgraded without your consent isn’t such a terrible thing after all.

A reddit user who was impacted by the recent TeamViewer hack reveals that the hijacker who broke into his computer didn’t manage to do anything harmful to the PC because he was quickly kicked out by the Windows 10 upgrade that was launched out of nowhere.

In most of the cases, these hackers were looking for PayPal data or other sensitive information, but this time, the search was quickly interrupted by the Windows 10 upgrade, which protected the computer in the most effective way.

Basically, when the Windows 10 installer launched, the hacker was disconnected from the PC because a network connection was no longer available, but you would have normally expected the computer to be exposed once again after the user logged to the desktop, right? Right.

TeamViewer also removed during upgrade

Only that the Windows 10 upgrade actually removed TeamViewer during the installer, so the hacker could no longer connect to the target PC - Windows 10 does that in order to prevent any compatibility issues, so applications that are being flagged as unsupported are automatically removed.

Of course, it’s quite impossible to actually verify this story, so don’t take it for granted, but it certainly is something that you wouldn’t normally expect when getting hacked. The upgrade to Windows 10 proved quite helpful in this case, and it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the user who got through this to continue running the OS as a sign of appreciation.

And here’s one last question: what if the hacker who broke into the computer has an obsession with keeping PCs fully up to date and he’s the one who launched the upgrade? Maybe it’s not good guy Microsoft, but good guy hacker.