His webcam light turned on.

Marcus never found out who – or what – spbup.exe really was. But he never ran an unknown executable again. Even if a filename sounds harmless or nostalgic, always verify unknown executables in a safe, isolated environment – and check file metadata before trusting the label.

Then the file deleted itself.

Someone had planted it. And Marcus had just run it – not in a VM, but on his real machine first, before moving it to the VM. He had forgotten to check the actual file creation date.