I wonder if you can advise me. My pc seems to be running OK, but yesterday while browsing a You Tube clip, I stupidly clicked on an ‘interesting’ box which said Ivana Trump was filing for divorce! As if. Big mistake, the computer froze up and I couldn’t get rid of the page. I got a dialogue box (presumably courtesy of my AVG antivirus? or something similar) that told me both in writing and in an American voice that I had just been infected with a virus that could harvest personal information and credit card numbers etc. The only way I could get rid of the page was to kill the computer, which I did in a panic, too quickly before I had properly taken in the details that were there on the page.
The first thing I did when I turned back on was to
- run the Spy Bot programme and AVG antivirus free editions.
- I made sure they were both up to date first.
- I did a full computer scan with both.
- AVG didn’t find any threats and
- Spy Bot picked up a list the usual sort of things, and I understand that those things were ‘fixed’.
The computer seems to be working OK, but I am nervous of doing anything like buying on line or going into a bank account. Basically anything that needs me to enter a password or pin.
Is there anything else I should do? When I go on to a site I always check for the padlock and https on the address line.
I think there are about three choices at this time:
1.
You can choose to trust that your anti-virus and anti-malware got on top of the problem
2.
Scan the machine using a special set up detailed on this page linked below:
“If that doesn’t work, you may need to step completely outside of Windows and use a bootable anti-virus tool. This type of anti-virus tool boots into a clean environment–entirely outside Windows–to find and remove stubborn malware you may not be able to see or remove from within Windows itself.” http://www.howtogeek.com/126911/what-to-do-if-you-get-a-virus-on-your-computer/
3.
But the most thorough way is to:
- back up you data only from machine
- wipe it & restore it back to factory
- scan the backup files for viruses
- you’ve left the more susceptible windows system files behind at this stage
- restore the backup files
