Removal of Fake Viruses and Trojans in Windows Vista/7

There’s been a right spate of nasty viruses going about recently which generally get in via scripting on a website and then take over your machine.  They start hassling you about buying antivirus products and fake scan your PC and show you are very infected.  The fact of the matter is, you’re not actually that infected but since your new little virus buddy has disabled Run, Task Manager access and cmd prompt, you will feel well and truly stumped.

Alas, you have nothing to fear if you have the slightest competence with a PC and hopefully with the command prompt.  A lot of people these days are all about the GUI, bad man, it’s bad.  You need to get some quality command line time.  Here’s the quick fix to rid yourself of the latest influx…

Reboot your PC, before the Windows boot loader appears, get tapping on your F8 key so you can get your secret boot menu.  Choose from Microsofts carefully selected choices wisely, you want SAFE MODE with COMMAND PROMPT.  You don’t need a GUI, GUI’s are for kids, cripples and people that like their tea with milk and honey.

Wait for lovely presented command window to appear.  Now here’s the easy task, you need to hunt down and destroy the virus.  Generally people don’t keep executables in their home folders, which is really handy as we’re about to remove any that may exist there.  Do the following and hit enter at the end of each line.

cd \users

You should now see your command prompt looking like C:\Users>

dir *.exe /s /a

This will search all files and sub-directories looking for executables.  Should it return with something like “aasdrwerwdf.exe” then you are infected.  Easy fix, let’s run a delete:

del *.exe /s /a

Generally that’ll give you the all clear, but some of the little bastards hide in another area, called ProgramData.  This is a hidden directory.

cd \programdata

dir *.exe /s /a

If you found any .exe files then

del *.exe /s /a

That is about it.  Reboot your computer and you should be good to go.  I recommend you ditch Windows if you can, try Mint Linux Debian Edition (LMDE) and you’ll stay free from this hassle.