I enter my password, and it tells me that I “need to change my password immediately”. It won’t let me use my account, unless I type in a new password or enter the old password 10 times or so.
After repeatedly entering the old password, it will eventually unlock my screen. However, the system date increases by a few hundred years and wifi stops working. Everything turns back to normal after rebooting.
This hasn’t happened for a while now, but it used to happen every few weeks. I find it really strange, both the system date and wifi bug, and the fact that I am demanded to change my password.
Did this happen to anyone else, and does anyone know what and who might have caused this? I am curious.
(The distro is debian 12 and the lock-screen/desktop-environment is GNOME 43.6)
I might be a bit paranoid here, but I would just re-install the system. Could be some malicious stuff at work here.
I was going to reinstall soon anyways, because I wanted to use full disk encryption. If the whole asking-to-change-password thing is just a random bug or a malicious activity, the reinstall would take care of that. But if it is a design choice or a common issue with either debian or GNOME (that can not easily be fixed), I might reconsider my choice of distro and desktop-environment, before doing the reinstall. I will wait a bit to see if anyone can identify the issue
What you are describing has never happened to me in the 8 years I’ve used Linux.
It looks like a bug in the malware, to be honest. I’d backup sensitive data and scrub the disk, while booting from a GParted live USB.
You may want to fully test your RAM with memtest while you’re at it. Especially if you’re going to be using encryption.