Basic advice regarding Viruses, spyware, and adware

[adnan]

At PC Point we get a lot of repair jobs for removing viruses/spywares from PCs. We charge £20 to £30 for removing them, but it is a very time consuming job. We do not guarantee that the PCs will be spyware free for ever. I would like to provide some basic information which will help to prevent these attacks.

Customers usually complain of PCs running very slow and a lot of popups appearing suggesting that there are thousands of viruses on your PC. These messages them self are spyware messages, which will offer to clean the viruses if you pay them money.

Spyware are like small applications installed on your PC. These normally get installed while you are surfing the internet, and click on something in a hurry which you shouldn't have. You might have noticed when you visit some websites a message appearing like a window or a popup appears informing you that you have won a prize, or that your computer has viruses. There will be a couple of buttons on it like Clean, Claim Prize, Cancel, Ignore, etc. A button can be designed with any label and with any actions. Therefore you can design a button with a label "Cancel" and an action of "Accept". No matter which of these buttons you click it will give them the permission to install the software. It is very common for users to just quickly click on Cancel/Ignore to get rid of the message, but without their knowledge this has given it the permission to install the software. This single click has given them a green light to download and install many other spyware/adware on your PC, which will tempt you to purchase something or send your browsing habits to themselves so they can send appropriate advertising messages to your computer.

An Antivirus software won't care about this as these aren't viruses. Anti-spyware can sometimes provide protection, but some of these spywares do get through and hack your protection software.

In order to prevent spyware attacks, do NOT react quickly and click on buttons when you see a popup message. Only trust the Red Cross on the top right hand corner of the window to close the popup. Or close your web browser by opening Task Manager (Right Click on Taskbar, and select Task Manager), select the browser application (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc), and click on "End Task".

If your PC has already been infected then there are various tools available to get rid of them. If you Google Virus Removal or Spyware removal, then you will see a list of many available tools. Some of these will be genuine like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky, etc, but they will need to be purchased. Most of the free tools in the list will be difficult to use and will cause more problems.

A very good FREE spyware/adware/malware tool is combofix (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofi ... e-combofix). There are links to download combofix.exe from bleepingcomputer.com or forospyware.com. Download it and save it to your desktop before running. If it fails to run then you will have to restart your computer in Safe Mode (Restart your computer, and press the F8 key just before Windows logo appears), before running this tool.

McAfee provide a FREE stand alone virus detection and deletion tool called Stinger (http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/). This will find and remove viruses, but it does not provide real time protection. For real time protection I recommend AVG Anti-virus Free Edition. Do not install the AVG Security Tool bar which is ticked to be installed by default during the installation.

Avoid installing ALL Toolbars, unless you use them. These slow down your computer and internet connection. Remove them through Control Panel.

Sorry I am not good at writing articles, but I hope you can understand the information provided and find it useful. Feel free to provide your suggestions and experiences.

Adnan Rana
htp://www.pc-point.co.uk