Trojan virus. Spotting the disease and medicine?

[Lesanne]

       How would one know if the Trojan virus was around?
                                    What remedy or medecine would one use?   

[anneymouse]

Hi there, first I would say that a good, up to date, anti virus protection should be uppermost in your mind.

Second, as an additional you could use an online scanner such as Trend Housecall: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Third, practice safe hex:

don't download unless you know its safe
double check executable files that friends send
ban the kids from the pc (they tend to click on 'download your free virus here')

[biglou]

Hi Lesanne,

A trojan is a particular type of computer virus not a specific one.  Trojans, as the name suggests, get into your computer on the back of some other piece of software that may appear perfectly innocent.  If you have been infected with any type of computer virus you may notice your computer running slowly, particularly when using the internet or many other kinds of unusual behaviour such as your internet browser connecting to "unusual" sites all by itself.

The only way to protect yourself, besides being careful (safe hex as anneymouse says)  is to use a firewall (Windows XP has a basic one), a good anti-virus program that is kept up to date at least weekly and I also recommend anti- spyware software.  Microsoft has a free one available for download at the moment.

On average an unprotected computer will be infected in less than one minute when connected to the Internet.

As long as precautions are taken seriously, you will not pick up an infection.

Paul

[Lesanne]

   Thanks for your replies, most helpful.
                               
                          Ok, so you've picked up an infection,
                                        what cures are there?
                                                       

[biglou]

Has your computer picked up an infection or do you want to protect yourself from one?

The medicine can be different depending on whether you have one already.  You should initially download and install Spybot S&D (Search and Destroy) from :-

http://www.safer-networking.org/

This is a free programme and if it is a trojan that you have picked may be all you need to clean it.  However you could be in for a long exercise.

Paul

[biglou]

Here is a link to some very good information about home computer security

http://www.cert.org/homeusers/HomeComputerSecurity/

It's long, but it contains some very important advice.

Paul

[julianb]

Thanks for your replies, most helpful.
 
 Ok, so you've picked up an infection,
 what cures are there?
 

If you have  a trojan, Spy-bot (as mentioned above) will generally remove it.  I got one which spybot recognised but couldn't remove, and I ended up googling the name of the trojan to find a remedy, which I did succesfully. 

There are a range of anti-spyware tools around, but as the previous post says the best approach is self-protection.  I use:

Zone Alarm Firewall (instead of the default Windows XP one); this firewall makes you give permission for programs on your machine to contact the internet, so if you have a trojan it would mean you would have to give it permission to operate.  The Windows firewall only stops stuff coming in.  There is a free version of Zone Alarm and there are other free alternative firewalls available.

Spybot Search & Destroy - which is basically a scanning program but has some protection features too (and some other useful tools eg for managing your start-up list)

Ad-aware - another scanning program for capturing and getting rid of any tracking cookies you don't want

Spyware Blaster - a point of entry program with a "blacklist" for Internet Explorer and Firefox

AVG Free Anti-Virus - there's other free AV programs like AVAST.

I'm also using Microsoft's Anti-Spyware Beta - but not sure how long this wil be free.

These of course have to be kept up to date (as does your operating system), but on my broadband conection I reckon this is just 5-10 minutes work a week.

There are loads of free utilities available (not just for security) - there's a good assessment here:  http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm

Good luck

JULIAN