I can't remove this virus off my PC |
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A Dublin undertaker contacted us. Every time he went to surf the internet, his browser would remain open for approximately two minutes before it froze and then unceremoniously crashed on him. He suspected the cause was a virus but when he ran his virus scanner it detected nothing. He then installed a different browser, but the exact same phenomenon started happening. The problem was becoming urgent for him. He needed to access the internet to submit death notices to newspapers and he needed to book the opening of graves with various cemeteries.
We arrived and found the anti-virus scan logs were all clean, no evidence of a virus. All the RAM and hard drive diagnostics tests passed. We set his system to show "hidden files" and in the system32 folder there were a number of suspicious file types that were not native to Windows XP or any of the programs installed. The symptoms were all pointing towards a rootkit. A rootkit is like a trojan-virus that gets embedded to core system files at root level and cannot be seen by most anti-virus packages. We manually removed the suspicious files, restarted his computer and the problem with the browser went away. To double-check that his system was all clean, we ran a root-kit detection utility that confirmed the system was all clean.