I would imagine you’ve come here looking for help in removing said virus? Perfect, because that’s exactly what I intend to help you do! I get this question many times a week and through literally years of trial and error there are some tricks I’ve learned that I’m very happy to share.
Step 1: A good defense is the best offense (yes, I know that’s backwards). I’m hesitant to just throw out numbers without any backup, but its my guess that 99.999% of viruses are self induced. Meaning you did something stupid to get it in the first place. UPS doesn’t send emails out with tracking numbers in a Zip file, your bank won’t ask you for your account information and P2P networks are more filth ridden than “K” street. If you do have anti-virus, know what its called and what its logo looks like. I’ve seen websites pop-up boxes claiming to be your anti-virus program trick people into downloading a virus and actually installing it under the guise of being an “update for your anti-virus”. In summary, be wary, if your not sure about something, stop and find somebody who does know.
Step 2: Get a safety net. Anti-virus programs have sorely disappointed me for years now, which is why I don’t consider it protection. Your anti-virus is nothing but a safety net, if you make a mistake the hope is that your anti-virus will catch you before you hit the ground. But just like a trapeze artist, if you don’t keep your anti-virus in good working order your asking for tragedy. Make sure you know how to update your software and if its sitting down there blinking at you, pay attention. Now is a good time though to re-iterate step 1: If you have “AVG Anti-Virus Free” (my personal recommendation) and a box pops up called “AntiVirus 2010″ telling you there is an update, ignore it, its a trick to get you to do something stupid.
Step 3: Banish the demon. So you boldly ignored step one, lapsed on step 2 and now you’ve got some gremlin inside your computer running a muck. Let me give you some tricks to try to get ride of the thing. Obviously I can’t lay out step-by-step instructions, there are simply too many types of infections and no one way to go about removal. GENERALLY the first thing to do is download and install “Malwarebytes Anti-Malware“. The name is a mouthful, but the software is free, easy to use and has a very good success rate. Just install the program, make sure you update it fully and run a full scan. Typically a full scan takes an hour or more, so go make a sandwich. When its done, click on ‘Show Results’ to see what it found, and don’t forget to click ‘Remove Selected’ to actually remove the infections. Very likely, you’ll have to restart your computer to finish the removal. Even if Malwarebytes doesn’t tell you to, do it anyway and then run another full scan, rinse and repeat until nothing shows up when you do the scan. If the same things keep showing up then you’ll probably want to skip to step 4.
Sometimes though, installing and/or running Malwarebytes is tricky. Below are some things to try (in order of ease to execute) to get the program installed.
- Rename the installer and/or the program (mbam.exe) to iexplorer.exe and try it again.
- Log in to the computer with a different user and try again.
- Start the computer in safe-mode (without networking if you can) and try again.
- If you are comfy at a command prompt, safe-mode with command prompt can be handy since explorer.exe never gets executed and can often mean that the viruses core never gets loaded.
- For advanced users only, check HKLM>Software>Microsoft>Windows>Current Version>Run for suspicious entries, delete them, restart and try again.
Step 4: Psalm 23. If you’ve run Malwarebytes over and over only to have the same viruses pop up then really your best choice is to make a backup of your data, format your computer and start over. This was the hardest lesson to learn for me, I don’t like to give up on something but frankly, there comes a point where you have to pull out the big guns and drop a nuke on civilization to get rid of a problem. If you have me come over (professionally or as a friend) to remove a virus, I’m going to spend not much more than an hour trying to get Malwarebytes to install and run, and If a virus isn’t gone in two scans I’ll ask you to backup your data. Its not worth anybody’s time to screw around with.
So that’s it folks, my 4-step virus protection and elimination plan. The goal is to never get to step 3, but if your reading this you’re probably already at step 4. My condolences.
Until next week!