New Years Resolutions- Part 2

By Robert Sanborn

To make matters worse, I have had two friends call me because they received a call from “Microsoft Support” telling them they are there to help them with an error report that they recently sent to Microsoft.  Guess what, they find errors and tell them that they will have to pay to get them fixed.  One of my friends called me while she had them on the other line and I told her to immediately unplug the power to her desktop and bring me the computer.  They had installed Tight VNC and ShowmyPC on her system to let them in later and probably to install keyloggers and the like.  She was lucky, the other was not. They had also hit her credit card for $195 which she needed to call and stop. I would also recommend replacing that credit card as well.

So, what do you do if you think you have been a victim of such? There are four programs that I use on a regular basis to try and clean these things out.  Kaspersky is a good place to start with their TDSSKiller Root Kit utility: http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208283363

The second is the RKill utility from Bleepingcomputer: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/rkill/

Third on the list would be MalwareBytes. This is a terrific free program that does a great job of ridding your system of malware after the fact. http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Fourth would be a good registry scanner program like CCleaner. It does a good job of cleaning out junk and temporary files from your computer as well as checking the registry for left over entries that can be deleted. From Piriform software.http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
Once you do that, start up your anti-virus or internet security package and have it do a full scan. If you still don’t trust it, go and run some of the online scans from places like Norton (Symantec), Trend Micro, or Kaspersky. My favorite right now for an internet security and anti-virus package is Kaspersky’s Pure. If you have more than one computer, get the three user license.

Once things are back to normal, this is also a good time to create a New Year’s Resolution to keep your computer running well.  As part of this, it is a good time to make sure that your Windows is up to date.  Click Start and in All Programs, look for Windows Update. Also, make sure you are running the latest version of Java, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Flash.  If you are still running Windows XP, I would be inclined to make Google Chrome my browser. If you are Running Vista, Windows 7 or 8, make sure Internet Explorer is at version 9.  All this will go a long way to keep your computer running as it should.