My covetous nature brought me woe recently; my PC was infected with a pesky trojan horse. It all started because I wanted to use the paid-features of a shareware for a short while, of course without paying.
Dear friends, avoid installing software from questionable sources (eg. torrent) without a decent updated anti-virus running and a little knowledge of what to do when infected.
By decent, I am not referring Norton or Mcafee. For more info, one can visit http://www.av-comparatives.org/ . My personal favorite is NOD32 2.7 from Eset. The trojan was detected during the installation of the questionable shareware, but the arrogant me brushed off the warning and continued.
Day 2 after the first warning, I noticed more warnings and pop-ups while surfing. It was the wake-up call to do a full-scan. By this time, the infection was quite extensive with most auto-start applications infected, making the clean-up tricky.
After many scans, cleanings and reboots, I was still getting warnings and finally the trojan infected even NOD32 control center application. I was close to giving up doing a local scan and go for pulling out the harddisk to another machine to scan.
Good thing is, I don’t give up easily, I found info from a few forum and learnt about a few interesting tools:
- HiJackThis, a reporting tool from TrendMicro that allows experts to analyze your windows so as to advise help!
- ComboFix, a free tool that fixes some common malware infections
Ultimately, it was a combination of using ComboFix and NOD32 that eliminated the trojan. Moral of the story, there are many good free tools, but not everything is free. Some, have a price to pay.
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