mgallimore

Being a novice to all of this I am wondering what the criteria is for considering your PC to be clean and free from viruses, trojans etc.

Most of the requests for help in the Virus / trojans section on this site are from folks who know they have a problem because their antivirus sotware etc tells them so or they believe that have a problem because their pc is misbehaving somehow. In these cases the production of the scans and the comments made by the helpers on this website result in the PC being declared clean.

If however you do not have any such warningings then how can one be certain that the PC is not compromised? I've had my PC for several years, it's got Bullguard, Zonealarm (I disabled the Bullguard fire wall so as not to effect the ZoneAlarm version). I've got OSI (trying to set up PSI) and I use a banned hosts file.

The Bullguard software declares my PC to be free of any problems. It has also detected and removed them in the past but it has also been run with it switched off.

My concern is that from I've read that the virus scanners etc are OK for detecting problems as they arise but not too good at detecting problems and removing ththem once they've struck.

So to recap - just because Bullguard tells me I'm fine can I actually believe it or is there a better solution / procedure for me to adopt.

Cheers

Mark

Fren Banklin

Bullguard is bundled in with Kazaa, a P2P filesharing software, and for that reason alone I do not trust that software. Guilt by association.

You can never be CERTAIN you are virus-free, but a clean HJT log and a successful scan at TrendMicro's HouseCall, and the absence of any symptoms/reason to believe you are infected is about as good as you can do.

The firewall is good. That's the second most important thing you can do.

Pop Quiz

1.) What's the first ?

A) Anti-Virus Software
B) Good Browsing Habits
C) Good Anti-Spyware Program
D) Having 23 different AV & AS programs installed, slowing your system to a complete stop, so that it can't do anything other than "be protected"
E) Being fully-updated at Windows Update


Answer is "E". Patches security holes before the malware gets on-board.

Please note a good many people thing "D" is the answer. The paranoia causes them to install multiple and needlessly redundant AV/AS softwares, and then when the system slows to a crawl, the self-fulfilling prophecy comes TRUE, and they believe they are INFECTED.

Which begets more paranoia, so they start downloading every AV program that promises to speed them up and free up memory and optimize the hard drive and defrag the registry and clean the registry and free up hard drive space and defrag the hard drive and clean the pagefile and optimize the clean file registry hard drive memory accelerator Warp Factor 9 Mr. Spock we gotta DO something, RIGHT NOW !!!

<b-zzzZt ! . . ....>

The natural result of paranoia.

So be careful. It's a bad world out there, but it's even worse inside your own mind.

wicket

agreed there is no such criteria...use a sandbox, run an app which guards registry/startup, dont use garbage avs, run a firewall, use HJT, read read read, get as much real world exp as you can so you dont have to take other peoples word for it, ohh and after all that you can be somewhat reassured you might be clean lol you could also do an institutional setup if you want to be 99% sure .... image your os after offline installing everything you need and have it restore daily at 3am or whatever... secure ....check
pain in the ***.....check

mgallimore

Thank you both for your replies. It's given me some good directions to go looking but it all sound like a lot of effort and trouble but rather that than loose data and have to do rebuilds.

Regards

Mark

Glaswegian

Mark

While it's almost impossible to say "100% clean", there are some things you can do. Scan regularly with a variety of scanners - your own AV and a selection of both online and offline alternatives. Remember, no one scanner will catch everything. Use several layers of protection and stay away from dodgy sites and P2P applications. For more detail have a look here

PC Safety and Security--What Do I Need?

mgallimore

Thanks for the reply Glaswegian.

I had a look at the article you pointed me too - very helpful. As I said in my original post, my concern is that after having had the PC connected to the internet with no AV / no PC software firewall activated I'm concerned I might have a security problem that is not now detected by the AV / firewall software now that it has been permenantly reinstalled.

Are there many installed trojans and other nasties that are undetectable by the standard PC based free software packages available on the net but are detected by your sites analysis of the logs that you instruct the people who request your help to supply?


Thanks

Mark

matthewforu

You can make your computer from the virus or any other virus or malware related threat
by simply installing the antivirus software on your computer.
There are various antivirus available in the market it can be free as paid one , macfee and nortan are key players in paid the antivirus list
YOu can also download and install the antivirus which are free of cost,, for example , avg and several other.

Glaswegian

Hi Mark

That's rather a tricky one to answer. We play a game - the malware creators continue to develop their techniques - and the AV vendors try to detect and add the definitions to their products. Sometimes the malware is ahead, sometimes the AV's and other tools are ahead.

All you can do is surf safely and scan on a regular basis. Regular scans using a variety of products should provide a good level of assurance.