We learned that Milday's desktop computer had become infected with a particularly nasty little trojan and I started casting about for solutions. I called my brother-in-law, Steve, who has been in the business for thirty years and picked his brain. He told me about a microsoft product, Microsoft Security Essentials. It's a free download and Steve said that he and his peers have decided that it's just about the best on the market right now.
I downloaded and installed it. It found the trojan in short order and deleted it. I think her computer is protected now. It's firewalled and I've set the program to make automatic scans.
Thanks, Steve!
I used disk imaging software to deal with viruses and trojans.
ReplyDeletehttp://disk-imaging-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
That way if your computer becomes infected you just restore the disk to a state before the infection.
Also file synchronizing software, such as FreeFileSync, makes it easy to keep an up to date copy of your data on a separate drive.
Don't count on it being clean. Nearly all the malware out there now tries to install additional malware, including rootkits that inveigle themselves deep into the OS. Sometimes they 'go to sleep' for a while then start acting up again.
ReplyDeleteThe folks who deal with wintels at work are about 90% of the way to just mandating a rebuild/reload or re-image if the customer has opted for that capability whenever a wintel box gets compromised. Its simply not worth the time and effort to try an clean them anymore, with the level of capabilities the malware has reached.
Best of luck with it.