I came across a suspicious pop-up that claimed to be a Cloudflare verification prompt, instructing me to press Win+R and enter a command. Here's what happened: I opened the Run dialog using the shortcut but when I tried to paste the command with Ctrl+V, it didn't work—only the letter 'v' showed up. I hit Enter with an empty Run box. I'm really concerned; is there any chance a command could have run even if nothing appeared in the Run dialog? How can I check if something was executed?
5 Answers
If something asks you to run commands with Win+R, always be suspicious. Cloudflare wouldn't need you to do that for verification purposes. Since nothing showed up, it seems like you got super lucky this time!
Never trust a site that asks you to run commands. No legit service like Cloudflare would request that. You're likely fine since nothing showed in the Run dialog, but it’s always good to verify your system for peace of mind!
Sounds like you dodged a bullet! If the Ctrl key didn’t paste anything, it’s likely nothing got executed. To be safe, you could run a Malwarebytes scan just to check for any potential issues. Better safe than sorry!
I’ll run it to be sure. I already did an offline scan and it didn’t find anything.
Open the Run again and check your command history; you might’ve saved yourself from running anything bad. If it’s empty, you’re in the clear! Just stay cautious about those kinds of prompts in the future.
I checked, and indeed, there are no commands at all.
Unfortunately, there’s a chance it could have executed a command despite being invisible. There's a trick where you can type a command in the Run window, hide it by placing spaces in front, and it still runs. I’d suggest looking into a Windows reinstall just to be safe.
I checked again, and there’s nothing in the history at all.