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Cleaning Tips: PC Edition (2015)

Boxes popping up left and right when you are trying to click on links.  Strange advertisement sound clips playing in the background.  Warning messages taking over your screen telling you that the FBI now has control of your computer and you must Paypal some bitcoins to the Pope to get your desktop back.

Computer infections, malicious viruses or annoying malware, can really make using your PC a pain.  The problem isn't just that you can't get work done, but it's that your might might also being trying to infect new machines.  The image below is just one example of how an infected machine sends out spam email with an attachment to infect new PCs.

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/03/12/upatre-update-infection-chain-and-affected-countries.aspx

So what can computer users do about this?  It turns out there are lots of useful tools that exist to help clean out a possibly infected PC.  I've blogged about this before, but since the computer tech world is full of change I thought I would write an updated post.  I'm only going to cover programs that run on Windows PCs since the various versions of Microsoft Windows make up the most infected of all operating systems, simply because they are the most widely used.  It's not worth the effort to infect 3 machines running some virtually unknown operating system when you can put the same amount of time and effort into writing a virus that will infect 3 billion computers.  This is why WordPress is exploited so often, it's one of the most popular platforms for creating websites.  If you run a site that uses WordPress, make sure to keep it updated!  And you'll want to keep those plug-ins updated too.  It's not just computers that can get infected, websites can get infected too.

So what are these useful tools you ask?  Well, here's a quick rundown of the lineup I use at my job to tackle an infected computer.  This will work about 95 percent of the time.  The other 5 percent of the time I end up just backing up the data and restoring the PC to factory state.  Restoring to factory state is usually the best way to go if you can stomach re-installing all your applications and settings.  If not, here are my favorite cleaning tools and the order that I'll use them.

{CLEANING TOOL NUMBER 1: VIPRE Rescue}

http://www.vipreantivirus.com/live/

The first item I like to run is the VIPRE Rescue scan application.  it's self contained and the latest definition is included when you download the application from their site.  So, if you need the latest updated virus definitions, you'll need to download a fresh copy.  I'll usually download a new one every week or two.

I like to boot the computer into safe mode.  Then plug in a flash drive, and double click the exe file.  That will then run a self extracting winzip package that asked if you want to unzip, and also includes options to run after it's finished unzipping.  I just leave everything as default and let it do it's thing.  There are no options with this.  It just scans, detects, and removes.  When it's done, it's done.

{CLEANING TOOL NUMBER 2: JRT - Junkware Removal Tool}

http://thisisudax.org

This tool is a bit shady, but I use it anyway because, well, it just works (despite the nagging feeling that it's infecting your machine with even more malware than it's removing).  This is another tool with no options.  Basically you run it, again, a DOS like box pops up and then it does its thing.

{CLEANING TOOL NUMBER 3: SUPERAntiSpyware}

http://www.superantispyware.com

There is a pay version of this utility, but the free version will work just fine.  Install the program after downloading it.  Then run a scan and see what kind of goodies (or in this case, badies since these are unwanted programs).  I would recommend uninstalling this program after using it if you don't decide to buy it since, in my experience it does seem to ask politely at regular intervals that you upgrade to the pro version.  I recommend buying either this program, or the next one in my list if you do decide to purchase a solution for anti-spyware/anti-malware.

{CLEANING TOOL NUMBER 4: Malwarebytes}

https://www.malwarebytes.org

This utility is probably the most well known out of all of these.  It has been around for ages and it works wonders.  Use this one just the same as SUPERAntiSpyware.  Install it, run it, uninstall it.  If you do decide to purchase either this one or the previous one for preventing future malware/spyware installations (I recommend purchasing at least one but not both, and as well make sure you only have one antivirus solution installed as having multiple installed can actually slow your computer to a crawl) make sure to double check the definition files are updating on a regular basis as well as the scans are happening regularly as well, otherwise the program is useless.

After running those 4 utilities  I recommend running the first scan utility one final time.  Running all of these utilities will take some time, in fact, it will most likely take several hours.  If after these programs have run, you are still having problems with popups or slowness, a full backup of your files and a restore are in order.  A backup and restore will work for almost any software related problem 99.9 percent of the time.  If there are still problems with your computer, it's time to run the built in hardware diagnostics utility, since one of the hardware components have probably failed.  Or as a last resort, take it to your local computer geek.

Happy computing!  Hopefully these tips helped to make things better (and not worse).  Please note that by running these programs and removing a malware/spyware infection, it is possible that the computer can actually stop responding all together.  Some of these infections are actually programed with self destruct code to destroy core system files on the way out...

MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE RUNNING ANY SCAN UTILITY!

And back up your data on a regular basis no matter what to as many places as you can.  You never know when disaster might strike.