Easy Maintenance Keeps Money Where It Belongs — In Your Pocket

Imagine if you never changed the oil in your car, replaced worn tires, or swapped used wiper blades for new, oh, the trouble one would see.

There is a better-than-average chance you have experienced a brush with infection on a Windows machine — or soon will. That is why maintenance is so important.

For months, my computer felt a bit lazy. Searches were sluggish; it was evident my system was bugged. While I'm a stickler for a clean system, sometimes ... it just happens.

In this case, my browser, Firefox, had been hijacked. Considered a security vulnerability, a hijacked browser produces elements of annoyance such as pop-up windows and advertisements, page re-directs, and the you've-won-an-iPod announcement.

I ran anti-this and anti-that, but none of it worked. I even uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, and included updates to the latest version. After a bit of research, I discovered that my machine was held hostage by a malware agent called a rootkit.

A rootkit actively hides its visibility while damaging functions and processes within an operating system, often executing other malware, and replacing critical core files with counterfeits. This can prevent further inspection, and cause sour turns in performance.

Even though the security and anti-virus software failed to detect the presence of this malware, I was able to determine both the location and name of the intruder by observing its behavior. I read that many other people were complaining about the same issue. Some message board entries even had step-by-step solutions to address the problem.

I tried each until one worked for me.

Rootkits, like all other unwanted viruses, can be fairly troublesome to remove. Indeed, after downloading and running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, the suggested program to detect and remove the problem, the system was still infected, yet log results came back clean. It was only after thinking outside the box — booting in safe-mode with networking off — was I able to run the program and another, TDSSKiller (by Kaspersky Lab), to remove the threat.

My searches no longer take detours to advertisements.

So, no matter the virus, trojan, worm, or key-logger, every infection leaves a trace, or displays visible signs that a system is infected. Maintenance of equipment is important — mechanical and electronic. It was only through maintenance was able to find and remove the issue, and shield the platform against recurrence.