I have a spyware installed on my laptop and it is filtering my internet usage in real time. How can i bypass the spyware and search the internet

Question

Both my Laptop and phone are compromised, a spyware was installed by someone who was close to me. Now I am not able to browse the internet fully. Search results on both Google and onion engines are not showing results which I have already seen before. The spyware seems to be filtering search results in real time. Sometimes when I search for keywords which I have not searched before on TOR results appear but when I open them the pages don't open. Keywords that i had searched before and had 100 links now turn up with no results. Now, i want to know any solution for the same. I have tried formatting the system but the problem remains. So, i am assuming the spyware has installed itself on the boot part and is unremovable which according to my research is possible. I have also tried every darn malware remover and antivirus but none of that works. What can I do to bypass the filtering set by the spyware keeping in mind that i don't have the money to replace my system. Also is there any way to know the exact date and time the spyware was installed on my system?

Answer 1

First of all, check whether there actually is one such spyware active, and whether it's on the phone and laptop.

Some good suggestions by users @user253751 and @brynk:

• try with a different browser in incognito mode. Both Firefox and Chrome have the capability of saving extensions into a cloud user profile, so re-factorying a device and reinstalling everything will avail nothing against a malicious (or ill-configured) browser extension.
• incognito mode also will ensure that e.g. Google will not helpfully "tailor" your results to your account profile. You probably already tried this, and however this wouldn't account for web pages not opening, but still, let's first tamp our ground.

Then:

• ask a friend's help. They need to have a different ISP from you. From their phone, connected on a mobile carrier, not your home WiFi, run a search for one such "banned" keyword. Verify that the search succeeds on their device.
• run the same search again from the same device, but connected to the WiFi. If the search now fails, you'll know why you couldn't get rid of the spyware - it's not on your phone at all, it is on the WiFi access point (or uses e.g. DNS poisoning).
• if both search succeed, tether the phone to your own phone and try a third time. If the search now fails, you've either got a really, really low level spyware on the phone, or something weird is going on in your ISP's. Tethering your phone to your friend's and having the search fail would prove that something is not right in the phone (if it succeeds, then it is your ISP that is filtering things).

It is really uncommon for a run-on-the-mill spyware to be able to run on a laptop and a phone, and be able to resist a factory reset. Unless you happened to be "close" to some state-level security services, I'd look for an alternative explanation; a hacked router firmware is still some issue, but more accessible than polymorphic stealth network filters.

The likeliest option, though (you did not specify what kinds of searches fail), is that the filtering is occurring at the ISP level. There are packages to do that: I happen to know someone who had a "child filter" activated on their home network connection for a prank. You might want to look into that.