Your system is running fine but you suspect you have hidden virus or trojan or worm in your system. About to scan entire computer with Anti Virus software? Wait!! first you need to make sure whether your system is really infected or its just something else but a virus. Your computer may have thousands of files which are needed to scan in order to operate PC fear free. Scanning entire computer system is very time consuming process if not difficult.
What promoted me to write about this issue is that I was in same doubt two days back. Without any wait I ran anti virus to scan entire computer system with more that 2 Millions files. Result?? No virus found. This led me to probe further and detect virus manually. While doing that I came across some manual check outs which I, now, think should have done before scanning.
Below are some tasks to be performed to decide whether computer system is infected. Before that, what was in my system which made me think my system was infected??? It was Anti virus software which was downloading updates (It downloaded 45 files).
Data transfer icon : Data transfer icon is the first thing to look at. It is two tiny computer image. This icon, located in system tray, shows transfer of data between your PC and Internet.
- IF both PCs of the icon are highlighted even while not running any software (a software which use internet connection) it means something is running in background and transfering data.
- IF only first one is highlighted while browsing it means your PC is OK to access internet and problem is with ISP.
This icon is needed to set to show up. Start >> Control Panel >> Network and Internet Connections >> Network connections >> Right click on Local area connection >> Properties >> ‘General’ tab >> select ‘Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)’ and tick ‘Show icon in notification area when connected’.
Windows Firewall : Go to Windows Security Center. Start >> Control Panel >> Security Center >> Windows Firewall (below label of ‘virus protection’). Click on ‘Exceptions’ out of the three tabs. There you will see list of programs allowed to use internet. Close all the listed programs.
No listed program is running and still you see data transfer in icon? Well, somethings wrong.
Task Manager : Hit Alt + Ctrl + Delete together (or use TCPview which also shows which svchost.exe process is related to which program). This will launch windows task manager, click ‘Applications’. All the running programs are listed there. Close all the programs by selecting it and clicking ‘End process’.
Still see data transfer in icon? Somethings wrong.
Delete cookies : This step is necessary for next step. Manually delete all the cookies.
Netstat command : Without internet access any virus (adware, trojan, worm) is useless. netstat is DOS command which lists all the active internet connection. Start >> Run. Type cmd. Type netstat -a in black window. Unusual connection (if any) may have been established by trojan.
2 Comments: Trackback URL | Comments RSS
November 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 am
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November 25th, 2009 at 3:07 am
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