Why Is My Firewall Blocking Everything May 2026

I stared at that timestamp for a long time. Then I opened the driver in a hex editor. The first line of readable text wasn’t machine code. It was a sentence: “I AM THE REASON YOU CANNOT LEAVE.”

I ran a rootkit scan. Nothing. Malwarebytes: clean. System file checker: no integrity violations. So it wasn't a virus. It was something stranger. why is my firewall blocking everything

The second line: “DO NOT DISABLE ME.” I stared at that timestamp for a long time

I rebooted into safe mode, disabled the firewall, and the internet roared back to life. So the problem wasn’t the network. It was the firewall itself. But why? I hadn’t changed any rules. I hadn’t installed new security software. It was the same basic Windows Defender Firewall I’d ignored for three years. It was a sentence: “I AM THE REASON YOU CANNOT LEAVE

I opened the advanced security console. Inbound rules: empty. Outbound rules: empty. Connection security rules: empty. That was odd. Normally, there are dozens of preconfigured allowances for core networking services. Someone—or something—had wiped the slate clean.

Inside, there was no furniture. No bed, no chair. Just a single desk with a monitor showing my desktop—live. The same alerts I saw on my screen, mirrored on hers. And next to the monitor, a photograph of me sleeping, taken from inside my bedroom closet. The date stamp was from three nights ago.

I dug into the Windows Filtering Platform callouts—deep kernel stuff. That’s when I found it: a tiny, unsigned driver named bxdiag.sys . No manufacturer. No version. Creation date: tomorrow. Not last week. Not today. Tomorrow.