How To Cure A Malware Infection

3 Easy Methods

What do you do when your PC is displaying all the signs of having been infected and/or hacked but your antivirus and anti-spyware scan reports come back clean.. or fail to remove the infection?

This was the case for a fella who called me for advice recently. He had done things 'right' -- and by that I mean he has a firewall, he keeps his antivirus definitions up to date, and he runs a couple of anti-spyware applications -- but suspected his machine had been hacked anyway.

He couldn't do things he was used to doing (like deleting a file) and his machine was "really slow." But according to his scanners, his machine is in perfect shape!
He was right, btw, he was infected.

Tip of the day: If you should find yourself in a similar situation there are several steps you can take to help resolve your questions and (hopefully) fix your machine without taking the drastic step of wiping your hard drive, formatting, and reinstalling Windows.

The first step is to use a scanner that isn't installed on your machine. Here's two ways to do that: one, if your antivirus allows it (and most of them do these days), follow its instructions and make an antivirus recovery disk. This is a bootable disk that scans your system before Windows loads.
[note: for a quick method to create an AV disc, keep reading..]

To use one, put it in your CD tray and restart your machine. A plain-text sentence will appear telling you to "press any key to boot from CD..." When you see it, hit your spacebar or, well, any other key, and then follow the instructions. When it's finished, remove the CD and restart your machine again. (You may need to set the boot order in your BIOS. For instructions, click here.)
[note: you may also use a properly prepared USB thumb drive. Click here to read my article on how to do that.]

A second method is to use an online scanner. I have a list, with links, of several good online scans on my website, here. Quite a few of the online scanning tools will try to sell you their full application, but you're under no obligation to buy. The big advantage to these two methods lies in the fact that they have not been compromised, or altered, and the files and scanners on your machine may be-- the modification being done by the virus or hacker.
[note: most modern malware blocks access to these sites. But you should try anyway.]

Another thing to do is scroll down to my "Today's free download" and download HiJack This!. Run it and dump the result into a .txt file (there's instructions for this) and then register on one of the HiJack This! forums (there's instructions for this too) and post your results there. Before too long, an expert anti-malwareologist [don't bother looking: I just now made that word up] will have looked over the intricacies, and will post their analysis and instructions. These folks are really, really good at what they do, and you can trust their answers. These volunteers get a big tip of my hat.

Hopefully these efforts will be rewarded with a rejuvenation of your machine, and you will be back in business again.  If not, you have my sympathy. You may have a rootkit and then your best solution is to re-format your hard drive and reinstall everything, or enlist the aid of a professional. There's no shame in that last -- the modern versions of viruses and worms are devilishly difficult to remove.

Today's free downloads:
HijackThis™ is a free utility which quickly scans your Windows computer to find settings that may have been changed by spyware, malware or other unwanted programs. HijackThis does not clean infections, but creates a report, or log file, with the results of the scan. A large community of users participates in online forums, where experts help interpret the scan results to clean up infected computers.

Avira AntiVir Rescue System This is a small download that, when launched, will create a self-contained anti-virus disc with the latest definitions. All you have to do is insert a blank CD. (You may have to go to an un-infected machine to do this..) It will boot even if your machine won't load Windows. Avira gets a big tip of my hat for offering this free tool, too!

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