Thanks for the thought. Even Linux has got the low life scum out hoping for an easy pay day. Some of that may be their competitors who knows? Or it could be some Cheeto eating, basement dwelling ...... doing it for kicks.
Or it could be someone/group from another country. Now that smart phones abound, you have people connecting from all over the world.
Long story short....I rarely use Edge, but decided to since I couldn't see everything on a website I wanted to see. So I look at that site, no issue. When you pull Edge up, MSN comes up too. So I look at the top stories before I am going to close the browser. I made the fateful mistake of going to the clickbait, and I'm doing okay. Then all of a sudden I get a verbal warning over my speakers, and a text message on the screen telling me I have just been infected with some trojan.worm... It went into great detail and made it sound legit, and the spelling was correct. It said to contact Microsoft Tech Support immediately and gave the toll free number to call...you know the drill. You couldn't close the browser either. So I do two scans, and find nothing. I decide to go into Safe Mode, and even though I had notes from before written down, Microsoft decided to change the Safe Mode arena, and jump through multiple hoops to get there. I want to hit F8 and be done with it. Everything seems to be working fine except my printer won't print...even though it goes through the motion of it. I am supposed to be okay on the black ink level. It worked fine not long ago. We've had one or two updates since then. This is an old printer, and I may be out of ink. So on and on this type of thing goes. I downloaded two anti-rootkit tools, and scanned with those...just a bunch of wasted time. I spent hours messing with this stuff. I went on one rabbit trail, then another. Let's say I wasn't a happy camper.