Fast, simple virus removal
Some viruses advertise themselves and some don’t, some even have the cheek to pretend they are helping!
Recently, one kind of virus actually presents itself to you as a helpful virus scanner. Unbelievably, 15% of the computers in the world at time of writing are affected by this! The virus pretends to find other viruses on your computer and then tells you to purchase a copy of the software to remove them. Unfortunately if you do, they not only have full control of your computer and internet connection, they also have your credit card details.
We’ve had a lot of calls recently about this kind of virus, so we thought we’d publish a quick guide for a bit of Computer “D.I.Y.”!
Very often even if you have a virus checker, these particular nasties can get past them by tricking you into clicking something that looks innocuous. Other times they exploit security vulnerabilities in your Microsoft Windows operating system or Internet Browser.
Once a virus is on your computer, it essentially swings the barn door open and allows others in for a party. Nefarious uses of your machine can be hacking attacks on internet sites, spam emails or malicious denial of service attacks to bring a website down.
So, if the virus isn’t kind enough to present itself to you as a fake anti virus…how do you tell if you have a problem?
Recognising a virus, these are the signs to look out for:
1) You can put the kettle on and make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the machine to load a program.
2) The machine takes an eternity to start up after pushing the power switch.
3) Your broadband speed is awful despite what they promised you.
So, here is a quick and easy health check and virus removal technique for you to perform at home before you need to press the panic button and call us out.
1) Start or reboot your computer and press the F8 key repeatedly.
2) Select “Safe mode with networking” from the menu presented. It will look something like this but varies according to the version of windows. This one is for “Windows XP”:
Safe mode with networking
This will load a nice clean environment for you to work in.
3) Open your internet browser and download [MALWAREBYTES] from this site [Download.com].
5) Install and run MALWAREBYTES. Once installed, run MALWAREBYTES and select “Quick Scan”. If you’re unsure how to do this, please read our [helpful guide].
After removal of any issues, just reboot your machine and allow it to start normally.
Usually this will be sufficient to remove most problems and allow you to re-enable any systems that may have been shut down to allow more bad things onto your system.
We recommend resetting the firewall and making sure Automatic updates are enabled at the very least. It’s also likely that if you did find a virus on your scan, you update any virus checker already on your system as the first thing viruses do is switch off the ability for the system to protect itself. Other common sense precautions are to change any banking or online social networking (facebook, MSN) passwords you may have used whilst the machine was compromised.
We hope this helps, any problems. Give us a call and we’ll be happy to help get you fixed up.
Andrew.
