I killed a virus…
… and it was a b!tch…
I don’t know how I did it, but for the first time in YEARS I managed to get a virus on my pc. I’m always protected pretty well with Avast!. It blocks intrusions when it has to, and kills adware instantly, but for some reason Avast! abandoned me this time. It noticed the virus, but I wasn’t able to repair it, move it to the chest or delete it.
I tried lots. My usual Hitman Pro solution didn’t cut the cookies either, because it got confused when it tried to install PC Doctor (which doesn’t run on x64-systems), I tried to download the programs Hitman Pro uses manually, but that was a big hassle, and I could remember them all.
I started my PC in safe mode, letting Avast! do some more scanning, and that got a few files removed. The virus was even in my pagefile.sys! I was happy it did something, but when I rebooted some weird programs popped up in my system tray, telling me I should buy MS Antivirus (or something), which pissed me off even more.
Windows Vista started to speak up as well. The Windows defender told me a few times something fishy was going on on my PC. WELL DUH!
I kept closing the defender, ’cause it’s probably not as good as Avast! and Hitman Pro together, right? Wrong!
After a few hours of desperation I decided to give the damn defender a shot. I clicked around and found the solution in freakin’ minutes!
Here’s what I did: Go to “Tools”, and click on “Software explorer”. In there go to the startup programs and remove every program that doesn’t look familair to you (with caution though).
After that select “Currently running programs” from the drop-down menu, and go to the “Publisher not available”-area. Click on the files that look fishy, and on the right hand side it shows which program it is, in which folder it resides and lots of other info. End the stinky processes, which in my case were located in the \windows\system\ folder. Hover over your system tray to make sure you nuked the right processes, and run Avast! again.
Et voila! Virus gone, PC clean, Mark happy.
Tags: avast!, defender, hitman pro, virus, Windows
