Windows 11 Push Notifications

[Grogan]

It seems Microsoft (in their infinite levels of assholishness) has provided no legitimate interface for deleting (malicious) push notifications. You can disable them, or disable push notifications altogether, but there is no way to delete the entries.

Dad had a fake McAfee popup on his laptop. It was at first saying the protection was expired, click this to renew it, but clicking the close button just spawned more with more dire warnings about (fake) trojan infections. At first I couldn't see where it was coming from (I removed a Microsoft edge startup entry and rebooted but that wasn't it) but I soon realized it was just a notification, being launched through Microsoft edge. The site was some pop.something.in (India). I disabled the notification (all, so nothing else can do this) but I can't remove it.

I'm pretty sure I found the notification databases in appdata/local/microsoft/windows/notifications but it won't let me delete them while Windows is running. Also, I'd expect there to be some registry data connected to these notifications and I'd have to find that too. I just settled for disabling them for now, but I think I'd have to boot off system to actually delete push notifications.

Microsoft Edge is always running, if you try to kill it or its process tree it just respawns more instances. Edge behaves like malware.

[Zema Bus]

And MS claims that “Windows 11 is the most secure operating system we’ve ever built”, which they designed to favour the malware writers in this situation

Looks like they're trying to integrate Edge the way they did with IE.

[Grogan]

I remember when Microsoft Edge first came out (before it used the chrome engine), it always opened to the last pages (with no setting to turn that off). You didn't even need malware, because Edge would keep putting the malicious sites in your face.

OK, OK, just delete the user's browsing data, right? No, that BROKE Edge. The browser would not generate its data again on first run. I had to use a very long powershell command to reset it.

LOL, it's not longer valid anymore, but I still had the command stored in a text file in the directory I used to use to reload my work stick.

Code: Select all

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml” -Verbose}

That's real user friendly.