Dealing hard to remove viruses on one's PC!

In days where PC viruses are not that hard to remove, a free version on any anti virus product will fairly do the job well. But as hardware and software advances, so with this criminal who are developing viruses that is hard to detect, even with those paid versions of those popular anti virus software.

If you suspect that your PC is infected with a hard to detect unknown virus, and your not yet ready to reformat your hard drive, you can try the following method:

1. Remove your hard drive and full scan it on another virus free PC with updated virus definition.

2.Another method is to download a rescue disk on some popular anti virus product(Kaspersky, bitdefender, avira,Norton...etc,), you can google it and its free.

Method 2 is more comprehensive than method 1 but its more tedious.

The concept behind using a rescue disk is to create a bootable disk out of the downloaded image and use it to scan you system.In this case you can full scan your hard drive without booting at the infected system thereby preventing hard to detect viruses(rootkits) to load at startup.After downloading use Daemon tools or PowerISO software to create the bootable CD.

Take note, downloading and creating the rescue disk must be done on a clean and virus free PC.

I am using a Kaspersky Rescue Disk but other anti virus rescue disk will also do the thing.

Click here to download Kaspersky Rescue Disk

One of the culprit of system slow down!

Have you ever notice that your OS and other applications seems to perform sluggish or slow, in spite you done all the necessary tweaking?

Before you think of reformatting your hard drive, try to uninstall your anti-virus and check if system performance has improved. Many problems I have encountered in the past in as far as system slow down is concern can be attributed to a problematic anti virus application.

Re-install the same anti-virus or a different one, if problem still exist, its time to reformat your hard drive to restore your PC's performance.

Have a nice day!

PC Turns On When Power Is Plugged In!

Have you ever encountered a system that automatically turns on, when power was just plugged-in in your AC outlet or the AVR was just turned on? Well this may be the same case I experience weeks ago.

Its a socket 775 MOBO, actually the brand is Asrock! I was troubleshooting an intermittent unit, I notice that when I turned on the AVR, the unit automatically turns on and it display a CMOS battery bad. Although the system works just normally(except for the time and date), it is not just normal. So I replaced the CMOS battery, and to my surprise the unit does not turned on automatically anymore,the system now turns on via its switch, therefore the previous problem was caused by a drained CMOS battery.

Strange problem can sometime remedied on an unexpected manner, that's what makes my profession challenging, you will encounter unusual problem all the time.

That's all folks, until on my next post and belated happy new year to all!

China Warns About Return of Destructive Panda Virus

A computer worm that China warned Internet users against is an updated version of the Panda Burning Incense virus, which infected millions of PCs in the country three years ago, according to McAfee.

The original Panda worm, also known as Fujacks, caused widespread damage at a time when public knowledge about online security was low, and led to the country's first arrests for virus-writing in 2007. The new worm variant, one of many that have appeared since late 2006, adds a malicious component meant to make infection harder to detect, said Vu Nguyen, a McAfee Labs researcher.

"It has gotten more complex with the addition of a rootkit," said Nguyen. "It definitely makes it more challenging for users to clean up and even to know that their systems have been compromised."

A rootkit burrows into a system to try to hide the existence of malware.

The first Panda worm gained fame in China for switching the icons of infected files with an image of a panda holding three incense sticks. The same image would also flash across a victim's screen, but the worm's final goal was to install password-stealing Trojan horses. The worm infected millions of PCs, according to Chinese state media. Its author was ordered to write a removal tool for the worm and later sentenced to four years in prison.

China's national virus response center warned about the updated worm earlier this week, but it dubbed the virus Worm_Piloyd.B and did not link it to Panda. The center said it had found a worm spreading online that infected executables and html files. The worm blocked a victim's PC from restoring infected files, turned off active antivirus software and directed the machine to Web sites to download Trojan horses and other malware, the center said. The center urged Internet users to step up defense on their PCs against unknown viruses.

The new worm is unlikely to hit as many PCs as the first one. Chinese companies and Internet users are much more aware of malware than they were a few years ago, partly because of the wake-up call brought by the first Panda worm, said Nguyen.

As in other countries, cybercrime looks increasingly professional in China and labor is often divided along the production chain from virus design to the sale of stolen information. Chinese police are rushing to keep pace and cybercrime arrests have become more common in the country. Police in central Hubei province recently took six suspects into custody for building and selling viruses and attacking victims with a botnet, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said this week. The group made over 2 million yuan (US$290,000) in about six months from their activities, the report said.

Separately, a Shanghai court this week sentenced a man to six months in prison after his Internet company spent the equivalent of $17,500 to launch a denial-of-service attack on a rival's servers, according to local media. The man's company, iSpeak, paid for the use of a botnet to attack rival Duowan.com, reports said. A botnet is a network of malware-infected PCs that an attacker can order to repeatedly contact a target server all at once, overwhelming the machine with requests for information and essentially shutting it down.

China officially had 338 million Internet users at the end of June, more than the population of the U.S.