A while ago I had an old laptop running Ubuntu on which i had a ransomware scare as well as an update issue stopping the computer booting at the same time (see original thread here). Long story short; after Chromium stopping me going to a page due to it being "misleading" and before shutting the tab I saw words including "ransomware", upon rebooting I got an error about "Spectre V2 Mitigation" which convinced me I'd been infected by the Spectre ransomware, but I think it was all a coincidence.
The laptop ran poorly on Ubuntu anyway, so all these things prompted me to install Lubuntu to try and resurect it today. I'm assuming that by installing the new Lubuntu partitian over the old Ubuntu partitian any malicious software would have been destroyed? This wasn't a complete formatting of the drive as the swap partitions were reused, so would this leave room for malicious software to remain on the HDD?
I'm probably being paranoid, but I don't want to risk anything (especially ransomware) spreading onto my main desktop. Are there any free programs you would recommend running to double check before linking the laptop to my network? Am I just being silly and paranoid over nothing?
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