DEALING WITH VIRUSES

Sooner or later, no matter which Anti-Virus program you use, you will need to deal with a Computer Virus. In a lot of cases users actually manage to infect themselves by reacting too quickly without thinking about their actions. While Internet Worms can in theory infect your computer without your involvement the majority of infections require a little assistance from the computer user.

The most common source of infections these days comes from the all too common poisoned web-site. Unprotected web searches, poisoned ads in legitimate web-sites and e-mail web links can cause you to go to one of these sites. What you do next will determine whether you escape or end up infected by the culprits operating the site.

Occasionally the site will suggest that you need to load an add-on or video player to view the web-sites contents. More commonly the ploy is to pop up a window stating that your computer is infected with a virus. Too many users assume that this is coming from their own anti-virus and click OK to remove the virus. This sets in motion an infection that will insistently tell you that you need to upgrade your protection level to remove the virus.

Before clicking OK, you can usually escape by closing Internet Explorer completely, Logging Off or Rebooting the computer. In no case should you click anywhere in the offending Window, even the red "X", which will almost always infect you.

Let’s assume you failed to follow the above suggestion and now find yourself infected with a virus. What do you do next? Well the first thing to try, assuming you have a good Anti-Virus / Anti-Malware product installed is to try and run them and do a scan of the computer. If you are lucky and the virus is not too sophisticated this may remove it as long as your protection software is up to date.

If you have Malwarebytes installed go into it, select updates, if possible, and run a scan. This is a fairly quick way to remove most viruses if its access has not been blocked.

More complicated viruses complicate life by blocking the ability of your protection software to get the necessary updates to remove the infection. Some will even identify your Anti-Virus software as infected and block it from running altogether. This requires that you escalate your efforts to remove the virus by rebooting in Safe Mode and retrying the scans.

To get into Safe Mode, reboot the computer while tapping the F8 key about once per second. This should bring up a small menu. Select Safe Mode With Networking and press enter. When the computer finishes booting up try using your Anti-Malware software to scan and remove the infection.

If you find yourself still blocked you have picked up one of the new Super Viruses that can even fight you in Safe Mode. From here the fight gets more complicated and you may require a specialist like ourselves to help remove the virus. This may involve disabling services or even an external scan of the drive from a healthy computer.

Even after removing these viruses you may have problems accessing the Internet. This is due to their action to block Internet updates. You can try different things to remedy this:

Go into the Control Panel / Internet Options / Connection / Lan Settings and disable any Proxy options that you may see there.

Exit to a CMD prompt and issue the command: NETSH WINSOCK RESET and then reboot the computer to finish clearing the settings.

If all else fails give us a call and we can help you from there. Most viruses can be removed It just requires the correct approach to do so.