Do you handle issues with someone getting into your computer and hacking it?

[Boat-20201]

Had some send a message that our internet was locked because someone had hacked into it and they said they were with Microsoft and I thought they were, never had that happen. We had norton 360 with lifelock and they told me that just slows your computer down and they were going to take that out and put up a firewall to give us better protection we paid them270.00 dollars for 2 yrs protection. Now I am feeling like we may have got taken is there anyway to see if our computer has been compromised? There name was US web and repair with microsoft in Redmond Washington.

[WAWood]

@Boat-20201 

From your description, you were the victim of a security scam -- and it's unfortunate you had to pay so much to have your PC trashed.  There is no safe way to remove malware from a PC without completely resetting it, as the crooks have ways of hiding what they did from malware scanners.

Your only real option is to do a complete reset of your PC using HP Recovery Media.  Unfortunately, that will remove EVERYTHING and put you back into initial setup again -- but your PC will be free of infection.

If your PC is a 2016 model or newer, you should see if you can make a bootable USB recovery drive using the HP cloud recovery tool on a working PC.

The recovery drive can then be used to install Win10 and the HP drivers and utilities that originally came with your PC.

Here is the link: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205