One of the most annoying and frustrating times with any computer is the day you pick up an infection, whether a virus, spyware or malware. Don’t think that because you have an anti-virus program installed that you cannot pick up an infection, because believe me you can & when you do it can stop you accessing the internet & various system tools like taskmanager or control panel and generally make your life hell.

These infections are usually brought about by “YOU” the user , opening email attachments that are infected, visiting bad websites that are known to carry such infections & clicking on various bits of naughty stuff on the net !!!

As previously mentioned I have BitDefender installed on my system as an antivirus measure, there are numerous others to choose from ie Norton Antivirus, McAfee, Avast, Kapersky, Trend Micro, Panda, but no matter which one you choose you are still not totally safe from attack. Why…??? because for the layman, the newbie, the beginer, you are told that once you get your antivirus program installed & then your internet security package (to protect you from hackers), then your safe, your fire proof. What a load of bull..!!!

No you are not safe, because many of the problems out there these days are not just simple viruses as was the case many years ago. For example take one of the latest little nasties “Virtumonde/Vundo” now here is a real pain in the proverbial butt for anyone running a PC.


Symptoms included:  pop ups. Vundo/virtumonde will cause the infected web browser to pop up warning advertisements; many of which claim a need for software to remove system infections. These can be very convincing as you will often see some pop ups that appear to be from microsoft or windows defender.The user’s desktop background is changed to the image of an installation window saying there is adware or spyware on the computer. The computers performance noticeably deteriorates & the system will frequently hang. If it is a particularly bad infection you will probably find that your task manager/your system registry editor/control panel are either missing or disabled.  This infection tends to get worse as time passes & it has been reported to also use what is known as a “dropper”, this is a type of malicious code that when activated will download to your system more little horrors just to emphasize the problems you are currently facing !

So your left thinking to yourself, what has happened…? my antivirus program must be crap !!! Hold it there before you start playing frisby with your antivirus disc & lobbing the heads off all the flowers in your garden ! The reason that your antivirus program didn’t pick up this little infection is quite simply because there are many kinds of computer virus & this particular one is not classed as a virus (believe it or not), it is what is termed “malware” and because of this it falls into a category somewhere between “adware”, “spyware” & “viruses”. So as I found out BtDefender did not recognise this little beasty as a problem on my PC, nor did Avast detect a huge infection on a friends PC & the same story is probably true of many other antivirus programs.

When I first had this infection on my PC, some time around mid 2007, there was not a great deal of help available to remove this thing from my computer system. In fact I think the only software available at the time, that could deal with this type of infection, was Spyware Doctor. Before attempting any removal process always ensure that your system restore is turned off (this is obviously not possible if you no longer have access to your control panel), because most viruses etc can duplicate themselves using the system restore facility. In addition to this it is also advisable to boot into safe mode to attempt cleansing your PC, the reason being that many, if not most infections only actually trigger when your Windows OS boots up, therefore booting into safe mode can aid removal of these little horrors.


So my system now has BitDefender installed as an antivirus package & Spyware Doctor as an anti malware/spyware package and although I have had one repeat infection (by inadvertantly clicking on the wrong thing on the net), it was dealt with instantly. One other piece of advice is if you see any of these warning panels pop up on your screen, then immediately unplug your internet connection & I mean physically remove your phone / broadband plug. This at least will help minimize any infection and help towards a successful removal. If all else fails and removal of this infection causes system errors preventing you from being able to reboot or access your system, then unfortunately there is only one option left and that is going to be a full format of your hard drive. This we will cover in another article as it is a major process and not something to be taken lightly.