How To Remove Malware and Viruses From Your PC

Malware is the scourge of the Internet to the extent that Google discovers over 9,500 new malicious web sites and provides 300,000 download warnings every day. Once installed, malware either feeds you advertising, feeds your browsing activity back to advertisers as profiling information, or if you’re really unlucky it waits for you to visit your online banking site and redirects you off to a malicious web site where it will collect your login details.

How Do You Know You Have Malware On Your PC?

When you start to see browser windows popping up with advertising messages for no apparent reason, you can be pretty sure that you have some malware on your PC. Otherwise, you may not see any visible sign of malware other than your PC grinding gradually to a halt. It turns out that malware is very sociable and once it finds a home on your PC, it will usually invite a few friends over to party! By the time that the malware party on your PC is in full swing, you will find that it takes forever to boot up, shut down, or open any application. That’s usually the time when you reach for the phone to call in your IT support company!

My Top 3 Malware Removal Tools

There are 3 tools that you can turn to when you think you have malware on your PC:

• Spybot Search and Destroy – Probably the most popular malware scanner – includes real time scanning.

• Malwarebytes – My personal favourite malware removal software.

• Combofix – If all else fails, try Combofix. It provides heavy-duty malware removal.

Malwarebytes has been my preferred malware removal tool for some time now.  Usually it will find whatever is on the PC and removes it in one full scan, although I always recommend running 2 scans to make sure that you haven’t got some “smart” malware which includes a hidden component that reinstalls itself whenever it finds that the main program has been deleted.

Sometimes however you will come across an infected PC that proves impossible to clean. When that happens, you just have to back up your data if you can and reach for the Windows installation DVD to reinstall.

How To Stop Malware Getting Onto Your PC

Malware finds its way onto your PC when you visit a compromised web site. If your PC is not kept 100% up to date with the latest security patches, criminals and cyber-scoundrels are able to exploit bugs in older versions of programs to plant their software on your PC.

Unfortunately there is no easy way of telling good web sites from bad ones. Diligence in IT maintenance combined with robust IT Security really is your only defence, and if you don’t have the time to take these tasks on yourself, then you really need to find an IT support company who can help you.

Web Security – How Do You Know If A Site Is Safe?

The Internet can be a dangerous place! We all love to scour the Internet for a bargain, but beware the bad stuff out there that can steal your credit card details, Paypal login, or turn your PC into a “zombie” that can be used by spammers and password thieves. Web sites that have been hacked and are being used to disseminate malicious software don’t advertise the fact .. in fact the web site owner probably won’t even know about it.

How Big A problem Is Web Security?

If you visit a compromised web site and your PC is missing the latest updates, you stand a good chance of ending up with software on your PC that you didn’t ask for. The problem is that it isn’t going to introduce itself and shake your hand! A bit like the neighbour you didn’t invite to your barbecue, it came along uninvited and it’s going to make a nuisance of itself.

How Do I Know If My PC Is Infected?

You are unlikely to recognise that your PC has been infected straight away. Internet malware can sit there silently waiting for you to connect to your online bank account so that it can steal your login details or send out so much traffic that it clogs up your entire network as we saw with one of our customers recently. Eventually though your PC will become unusable as more malware gets downloaded at which point you need to call your IT support company.

Which Are The Most Dangerous Web Sites

It's not just “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”  web sites that are potentially dangerous. According to a Symantec study in 2012, 61% of malicious web sites are regular web sites that have been compromised and infected with malicious code.

The Top 5 Most Exploited Web Site Categories - % Of Total Number Of Infected Websites

1.       Blogs / Web Communications - 19.8%

2.       Hosting / Personal Hosted Sites – 15.6%

3.       Business / Economy – 10%

4.       Shopping – 7.7%

5.       Education / Reference – 6.9%

Whilst these figures are based on 2011 data, the percentages won’t have changed much, and new around 9,500 malicious web sites are being found by Google every day.

How To Protect Your Computers Against Internet Malware

Home users need to make sure that their security is kept up-to-date. Make sure that you enable automatic updates for Windows Updates and keep applications such as Java and Adobe Acrobat updated as well. Malware exploits bugs in software that is installed on your PC to upload malicious code to your system, and regular updates are your best defence. There is no  need to shell out large amounts of money for security software though. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and good enough for home use. 

If you are a business, the same principles apply, but you need to take your IT security a little more seriously:

• Make sure that all Windows / Java / Adobe updates are applied to your computers on a weekly basis.
• Make sure you run commercial security software.
• Monitor your PC’s for tell-tale signs of trouble.
• Use web security software to block access to known infected sites as well as pornographic / illegal / non-business material

A little common sense also goes a long way. If you are asked to click on a link in an email, or a Facebook / Twitter post, engage brain before clicking. Is the person that it came from likely to have sent you a link to ”Some hilarious pics of you”? If in doubt, don’t click! 

Dude - A virus ate my customer's internet connection!

Did you think that viruses were a thing of the past that you don't have to worry about any more? Well here is a story from one of our customers that shows that the Internet really can be a dangerous place even for the most security conscious companies. Understandably, businesses focus on making money rather than IT security. The problem is that when you get a malware infection (which many of you will understand better as viruses), you may not know about it, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t cause problems for your company.

Recently, one of our largest customers was having problems with a web security system that they had bought about a year ago. They have around 2,000 IT users and a sizable internet connection, but something was bringing their system to a grinding halt, and quite a lot of the web connections had very little to do with their line of business!

Since they have a support contract with us we held our hands up to do some investigation as to what was causing the problem, and it soon became obvious that 75% of their network traffic was coming from a single PC which had obviously been infected with malware and was generating huge amounts of network traffic which was clogging up their Internet connection.

The graphs below show you what happened as soon as the infected PC was removed from the network. It’s amazing what one infected PC can do!:

Web connections per hour dropped from 20,000 to 5000.

Blocked connections per hour dropped from 14,000 to 0.

Connections per hour to “malicious” sites dropped from 20,000 to 0.

We will never know how the malware ended up on our client’s PC. They were probably just unlucky and visited a hacked web site that took advantage of a missing security update to infect the PC. What it does demonstrate though is the importance of making sure that your PC’s are kept updated to minimise the likelihood of picking up a malware infection. 

Just imagine the devastating effect that a similar incident could have on your company if you rely on cloud services for your line of business applications. It just goes to show that as you grow more and more reliant on the Internet to run our businesses, you will need to make sure that your security is up to scratch.