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This may be a dumb issue, but I have no other way to find out. At some point I was sent a facebook message from someone with a name of a person I knew, who wrote something along the lines "haha I found this old photo" and a link.
A year or two later, I found the Google series on how they were hacked, and in their first episode (EP000)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=przDcQe6n5o
they described exactly the same thing. Someone clicked a link that looked similar to what I got, around (5:14) in the video. Eventually they figured out that the Chinese Gov was involved (15:15). The motivation being as simple as spying on people that advocate for human rights in China.

Anyways, sometimes I notice my PC being slowed down significantly, and today again. Things start to lag, especially whenever I use the browser, no matter which browser. But my task manager shows no suspiciously large activity on the ethernet tab, or any tab. My cache is cleared, my PC restarted, doesn't change a thing. At some point it will recede again. It happened a couple times now.
I don't know how to track devices that are using my network. The router webpage tells me which devices were connected at some point, but I can't see or figure out how to see who's been using my network over time to figure out whether today there was a device in use that I do not know. Or which servers I was connected to during the week. Maybe I'd find an outlier.

Sorry for this rather long text, but I am somewhat paranoid because I do not know how to find any information on how to help myself with this issue.

Edit: So, reinstalling Windows is a solution, but if there is any means to find whether I was attacked, for the sake of learning, I'd love to know.

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At some point I was sent a facebook message from someone with a name of a person I knew, who wrote something along the lines "haha I found this old photo" and a link.

This was probably a phishing, spam or similarly malicious.

Eventually they figured out that the Chinese Gov was involved

Although I doubt you would have attacked by the Chinese Government.

Anyways, sometimes I notice my PC being slowed down significantly, and today again (...)

Probably unrelated to an attack. But anyway, both for getting your computer working better and your own peace of mind, I would suggest you to perform a clean reinstall.

If you were compromised, this will very probably clean it up. And, (as it's likely) you were not, you will at least not worry more about it. And the computer should run better after that.

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  • I mean, I am aware that there is no particular reason for me getting singled out. But I could imagine some malicious actor amassing data indiscriminately. Thanks, yeah, I should do that. That will be a mess...
    – Leviathan
    Dec 7, 2022 at 2:36
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    Well, I think most attacks are indiscriminate nowadays. Not too likely the two things are related, though. It probably is not trivial, but seems the best solution.
    – Ángel
    Dec 7, 2022 at 2:41

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