As others have suggested, I will replace my router immediately. Thank you all very much for taking your time to review my issue. Your insight is appreciated.
I will replace my router, switch on firewall and ensure that the management account is not accessible on WAN side.
I'll also use a VM in...
:( unfortunately my setttings don't look like that. My router can't update to the latest firmware. @AfriNatic assisted with updating but the router cried "File too large"
Yeah I ran scans from a website that verifies if a port is open. It said 21, 52 and 80 are open. But initially after I had reset my router, it said they were closed.
please don't tell me my router it self is cooked :(
Something I forgot to add when i initially posted this was that when my AV said my dns is compromised, I went on my router's settings > DNS settings and I found there was a new dns server entry. This was puzzling because I know it was set to automatic but in this case, there was a dns server ip...