Protect from Viruses.

How to Fight Viruses & Malwares
( Highland Computer Solutions )

Prevention & Protection:
The traditional methods are:
Install an antivirus package.
Enable browser security tools
Be sure to enable windows firewall
Be sure to enable Windows Defender ( which is free )


Always get a second opinion:
Use free scanners available on top of your favorite antivirus. (See the section "living without antivirus" )




A Different Approach:


A different approach is to use software packages which allows you to work in virtual mode. The idea is that you are not working on your real operating system but a copy of your system ( a sandbox ). At the end you choose to commit whatever changes you want to save to hard disk. (i.e. if you are editing a word document you choose to save it, but don’t permit any changes that you have not done on any other area. )


http://www.shadowdefender.com/
http://www.returnil.com/




Living Without Anti Virus:

People don’t like Anti Virus software packages for many reasons. Many of them are resource hogs, obtrusive and expensive. Whatever the reason might be, can you make it without any protection? If so how? Following are a few guidelines.

1. Always use browser provided security features like popup blocker, spam filter etc.
2. Use Windows Defender. (On XP you have to download and install it.)
3. Use online free virus scanners. Some scanners allow you to scan and remove viruses, where as others just let you know that you have infections. Following online engines allow you to remove the viruses.

A) http://www.bitdefender.com/scanner/online/free.html
B) http://onecare.live.com/site/en-za/default.htm?mkt=en-za
C) http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/

Following scanners allow you to detect them but don’t remove them. (Why use them? You can find out that if you are infected )

A) http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
B) http://home.mcafee.com/Downloads/FreeScan.aspx


4. Enable Boot Sector protect in BIOS so that boot sector of your hard drive is always protected.
5. Make another User login in your system with very limited permissions. When you are treading on dangerous grounds login to this user id and do it.
6. To remove spyware use

http://www.malwarebytes.org/
http://www.lavasoft.com/

What do I do if I'm Infected:

So your computer is infected. What to do if you do not have any antivirus protection. Depends on how bad is your system.

If you can load the operating system:

Use the free scanners explained in " Living Without Anti Virus" . You may want to try all of them one by one and see if any viruses are detected and choose the option to remove them after scan.

If you cannot boot to operating system or the system is not stable:

If this is the case, then you got to download a rescue CD to another computer and burn it to a CD. You have to boot your infected computer with this CD and then scan your hard drive.

Following are the tools.
Bit Defender Rescue CD.
http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/BitDefenderRescueCD_v2.0.0_3_08_2009.iso
Kaspersky rescue CD.
http://devbuilds.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/

Happy virus cleaning.


Highland Computer Solutions.
Las Vegas.