Virus Infection
This is becoming like Groundhog Day, I've started writing this several times but can't quite get what I want. It started out as a small piece on internet privacy and security, but got so large that I have abandoned the original in favour of writing a little of what can happen when you get a virus.
“I won’t get a virus !” Have you said that ? I have, and how wrong was I. So wrong.
I had a virus on my computer for around 6 weeks before it became obvious that there was something potentially major going wrong. I’d had the occasional program freeze on me, but that can happen at any time if you overload the RAM and the cache. One evening, Windows started up ok, but after that no program would open fully.
So, what had led to this? Simple – my anti-virus wasn’t up to date, the free update period had expired and I hadn’t got around to checking out other options.
What did I do about it ? Fortunately Ian had told me about a free anti-virus program, AVG by Grisoft. I rifled through the stack of magazine discs and found it on several. I loaded the latest version and started it. Within seconds I had a bright, flashing sign across my monitor “VIRUS DETECTED” . When it was finished, I was presented with the fact that a .dll file, the name of which I can’t remember, was infected by a worm virus called Nimda.
I was then given choices;
1 Ignore It
2 Put it in the virus vault
3 Delete it
Answers
1 Not a chance
2 It is secure, so maybe.
3 If possible.
It also told me that 6 other files were infected, but they weren’t specified.
All I had to do was to search my windows disc for a copy of the .dll file which had been infected, copy it and then paste it into where the infected one had been. After that I checked every file individually in the file where I keep my downloaded items, found the 6 infected and deleted them. This done, all was back to normal and the computer fully operational. The final piece of good fortune was that the version of AVG I loaded already recognised the virus. If not I would have needed to update it from the Grisoft website which would mean I would have had to restart the program. It is possible that the infected .dll file may have stopped me re-opening AVG. If this had happened, I would have had to reformat the hard drive which means that I would have lost any work since the last time I backed up the data last.
Now what do I do ? I let AVG update itself every day.
Here are a few AVG product options:
AVG Anti-Virus Professional Edition
Since then I have also discovered that there are some trojan viruses that normal anti-virus programs can't deal with. This led me to Emsisoft and their "A Squared" anti trojan application. The free version needs to be run manually, but I haven't found anything it can't deal with.