Spyware and Malware problems?

Here are some useful tools to use if you are having spyware or malware problems. ‘How do I know if I have something on my computer’? Well, there is no real sure shot way of knowing that but your computer normally shows some kind of symptoms when it is infected. Your computer might slow down, have an increased activity of pop-ups and diverts to inappropriate sites, changing your browser homepage and so on.

Running an online scan is the amongst the first steps to do. If you have persistent infections show up in subsequent scans, restart the computer, and press F8 at the boot up screen till you get the option to boot to ‘Safe Mode with Networking’.

Here are some useful sites to run an online scan:

http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan/

http://www.spywareguide.com/onlinescan.php

http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html

http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

If you are an advanced user and know what you are doing, you should use Hijack This to run a scan of the running processes. There are many forums where you can seek help by posting the log file from such a scan. You can download HijackThis from http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html

If you don’t know what you are doing, it is probably not a good idea to proceed without asking someone. Using HijackThis inappropriately can render your system unstable.

Feel free to contact me if you need any help. Have patience since I can’t guarantee immediate help.

• Posted in: Internet