Malware that’s ***really*** difficult to remove
I’ve just fixed a badly infected computer system.
It was a celeron 466Mhz, with 256Mb ram & winXP (sp1).
Its not a blazingly fast system, but OK for what the owners need.
It had quite a lot of Malware on it, and my standard run of Antivir and Ewido (in safe mode) didn’t get rid of everything… OK, looks like I’ll need to do what everyone else says: run a few different anti-malware tools.
Some of the spyware found was: spywarequake, valueclick, vcodec, windows.security.internet.explorer
After the first round of removing malware, I upgraded to SP2.
I took this opportunity to closely evaluate spybot S&D and try a few combinations of tools.
I managed to clear everything by running Antivir, Ewido, and Spybot (with spybot and its teatimer monitor, I didn’t need to use winpatrol). All up, quite a lot of work!
I’ll need to try combining avg and spybot, as I don’t like the overlap of antivir & spybot (both will scan for malware), but the combination could cause conflicts.
I eventually had the system running with just antivir and spybot (with teatimer), and taught the customer to manually update Spybot and SpywareBlaster
These malware infections are starting to get more difficult to clear! Its becoming increasingly tempting (and cheaper) to just do a fresh reinstall of WinXP.
I use Spybot, Ewido, Antivir, Spyware Blaster and sometimes even Ad-Aware. Ive never had any problems with conflicts and I continually have a clean system. I also have Sygate Firewall on so I can protect all incoming, outgoing connections. It seems like alot, but I really have to do bugger all. Worth it I reckon.
Yep, I use outpost, antivir, ad-aware, ewido (without the resident scan), winpatrol, spywareblaster, bhodemon, hijackthis.
But on some systems with 256Mb, or even 128Mb, I can only (realistically) use antivir and spywareblaster, and either startupmonitor, or winpatrol.
Also, some (many) people are not tech-savvy, so too many tools confuses the heck out of them.