The description of the problem is in the Youtube video. I was trying to listen to a song at SoundCloud (or, perhaps more likely, a malicious site that imitates SoundCloud; I did not check the URL too closely), and as soon as I hit the "Play" button, my laptop's screen entered a "dead pixel test pattern" where it flashes white, black, red, green, blue in succession. It now does this constantly, even at bootup - sometimes you'll get lucky and see the startup screen, but more often it starts that test pattern from the very moment you power on the machine. Additionally, it is very clearly doing something behind that pattern - one time when I was able to log in to Windows before the test pattern started, I noticed that a) Dropbox had been disabled, and b) the machine was uploading a huge amount of data - 1GB in the perhaps five minutes I was able to use the machine. (Naturally, once I saw that upload happening, I disconnected from the network. Unfortunately I did not have a chance to find out where it was sending data and/or what data was being sent before the test pattern activated again).
Is this a known malware, or something new? Has this happened to anyone else; does anyone know anything about it?
Thanks in advance, HN.