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.

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.