Cursed Viruses, They're Of The Devil!

So yes, I’m a little more vulnerable than most because I have 11 computers connected to the Internet from my home, 7 of which are being used by non-technical children/wife. I’m pretty tenacious and usually try for hours to hack into the registry and rid the virus manually myself. This is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing (and it’s dangerous even if you do). It’s somewhat easy to mess things up with your system if you’re not careful in the registry, which will require a reformat and complete reinstall. OK, I admit it, the dark side wins, they successfully have driven me to madness!

Usually, the most effective thing to do is to just reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. This takes a great deal of time but at least once you’ve been through the exercise a few times you get pretty efficient at it. I have two hard drives on all of my PCs, the 2^nd drive should be used for data that you don’t want to lose. That should never really get infected. The primary drive is for the operating system and all of the applications. That way I can reformat (losing everything) at will.

Then you start thinking about the value of utilities like “Drive Image”, “ True Image” or “Ghost”. The beauty of these tools is that you can create an image of your computer after all of your software is installed. Just try to limit using the Internet to updating your Windows, Antivirus maintenance, and things that you know are legit until you get a good copy of the image. I get all of the most current and proven drivers loaded, my windows maintenance, MQ Office, Paintshop Pro and other tools that I use as a standard took kit (winzip or winRAR, codecs, VLC, Mozilla, Macromedia Flash and shockwave players, etc.) Just get the thing loaded up as much as you can but avoiding stuff that you’re unsure of. Then take your image and next time you get a virus, you can just reformat your drive and then restore the image and you’ll be way ahead of the game.

It’s risky to keep taking image snapshots because you most likely will not know when exactly you picked up the virus. So I just try to get a standard image and keep it around for when I need to rebuild the machine. Gwen’s PC was the latest victim, infected with a nasty Trojan Horse called av360 (Antivirus 360). What it does is act like a free legitimate antivirus program and detects like 30-50 fake viruses on your PC and then tries to get you to buy a utility that will go and clean up the hoax viruses. The fact is, av360 is the virus, and it goes undetected right on by Norton and McAfee (way to go Norton and McAfee).

I found out that if you don’t have Norton Antivirus on your PC and then try to install it after the PC is infected with av360, it will cause Norton to not be able to download updates. At this point you’re toast, the only way to get rid of it is to reformat. I also just found out, because this time I did have Norton installed already, that even with the latest updates, Norton doesn’t detect this thing.

There are dozens of write-ups and alleged free utilities for removing this virus if you google av360. I avoided the free utilities because I can’t be sure that they are legit. I did go in and hack the registry and searched the files out and removed them. I’m certain that the offending program that brought the Trojan in in the first place is still out there dormant on her PC, so I may still have a problem in the future. But at least for now the phony virus pop-up that was coming up every time Gwen did anything on the Internet, is now gone. As it was in this case, not having to reformat means I am victorious (this go around)!

I have some PC issue to deal with at home usually every 1-2 weeks, it’s always something fun…