Howdy, Framily.
My Dell laptop was infected with the Virtumonde trojan horse even with AVG anti-virus installed on the laptop. After various attempts to clean out this nasty infection without lasting success, Jack and I decided to restore the hard drive with a backup file from an external hard drive. I use Acronis True Image to backup the hard drive. BUT before we did this and consulting Ned, I copied My Documents to the external hard drive.
When I looked on the external drive, the last backup was dated 12/2008. I really didn't know for sure how long Virtumonde had been on the laptop but I took a chance that the backup file was clean. Acronis did the job and restored this backup to the laptop. That took about 45 minutes.
The next step was running PC Tools' Spyware Doctor with Anti-virus doing a full scan of the laptop. Well, it found a lot of low level threat stuff and one medium level threat. That was cleaned out. Next I got Window Updates, a whole bunch. The download and install of those took about 3 hours. Next, had Spyware Doc do another full scan and it found more junk - infections. Cleaned that up. But no Virtumonde trojan horse.
The fact that I had heeded Ned's admonitions to back up my hard drive resulted in restoring the laptop's hard drive WITHOUT having to format the hard drive and reloading the entire OS plus all the other stuff. So, once again, here is a big THANK YOU to Ned Reiter for his reminders to BACK UP YOUR COMPUTERS!!!!!
I also learned the hard way to keep the Windows Updates current.
Thank you, Ned.
Regards,
Liz Pearce
My Dell laptop was infected with the Virtumonde trojan horse even with AVG anti-virus installed on the laptop. After various attempts to clean out this nasty infection without lasting success, Jack and I decided to restore the hard drive with a backup file from an external hard drive. I use Acronis True Image to backup the hard drive. BUT before we did this and consulting Ned, I copied My Documents to the external hard drive.
When I looked on the external drive, the last backup was dated 12/2008. I really didn't know for sure how long Virtumonde had been on the laptop but I took a chance that the backup file was clean. Acronis did the job and restored this backup to the laptop. That took about 45 minutes.
The next step was running PC Tools' Spyware Doctor with Anti-virus doing a full scan of the laptop. Well, it found a lot of low level threat stuff and one medium level threat. That was cleaned out. Next I got Window Updates, a whole bunch. The download and install of those took about 3 hours. Next, had Spyware Doc do another full scan and it found more junk - infections. Cleaned that up. But no Virtumonde trojan horse.
The fact that I had heeded Ned's admonitions to back up my hard drive resulted in restoring the laptop's hard drive WITHOUT having to format the hard drive and reloading the entire OS plus all the other stuff. So, once again, here is a big THANK YOU to Ned Reiter for his reminders to BACK UP YOUR COMPUTERS!!!!!
I also learned the hard way to keep the Windows Updates current.
Thank you, Ned.
Regards,
Liz Pearce
