Virus, Spyware, and Other Evilware Remediation

Even the best anti-virus/anti-spyware software can't block everything. It's a cat and mouse game with organized and freelance criminals around the world discovering yet another security hole to exploit, software developers working to close it, and defenders learning how to block such attacks. You can keep your software up to date, run good defensive software, stay off tacky web sites, and not open suspicious E-mail, but the right piece of well-crafted evil software sneaking past your own defenses can still get you. Once you've been had, a scan by the same defensive software that allowed the attack in the first place is unlikely to clean it.

For cleaning messes that your main defensive software allowed, Malware Bytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) and Hitman Pro can scan and find many evil files, but they might not be able to remove them. You can download and run them for free, but if you choose to pay for and run their real time scanning, be sure to remove your current anti-virus/anti-spyware product and reboot. Multiple real time anti-virus/anti-spyware programs running at the same time can fight with each other and drag your system performance down to useless.

When all else fails, we have developed manual techniques for cleaning up after attacks. We start by backing up valuable content and then find and remove evil files, most of the time restoring the system to its pre-attack state. Unfortunately, some attacks create so much collateral damage that there is no reasonable recovery path. We have had a high success rate for recovery from attack, and even when recovery is impractical we can usually retrieve most of your valuable content before wiping the disk clean and re-installing the operating system.