10 ways to prevent or remove viruses
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen a half-dozen clients and friends get hit with some seriously yucky computer viruses. One virus had infected over 1800 files on a website. Another had infected thousands on a personal computer. Viruses can ride in on emails or be delivered by visiting infected sites on the net.
If you want to prevent or remove a virus, here’s 9 of my favourite tricks and tools to make it just a bit easier. IMHO.
1. Avast Antivirus: Offers a free, powerful home version that you can download. Avast allows you to scan right from the boot which is one of the best ways to get rid of a nasty bug. Unfortunately, the boot scan doesn’t work on 86bit computers, but the rest of the program will work. You can run Avast after you’ve been hit with a virus as well and it often can clean things up. For a real first scan, it’ll take hours, so don’t try to use your computer until it’s done. http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download
2. Malwarebytes: This hasn’t let me down yet. And the free version does a great job. This caught the big keylogger virus that infiltrated my entire network and website a couple of years ago. I call that time the dark ages. There’s two options. Buy it for about $25 or download the free version. http://www.malwarebytes.org/
3. FireFox: I rarely use Internet Explorer anymore. Firefox often blocks infected websites with a warning message. On a side note, it’s great for web developers. I only return to IE when I’m using my Sharepoint since IE and Sharepoint get along better with each other. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
4. Panda Antivirus: This software was loaded up by one of my computer guys and it did catch some stuff that Avast didn’t. But then Avast caught bugs that Panda didn’t. Panda doesn’t offer a free version. http://www.pandasecurity.com/canada-eng/homeusers/downloads/
5. HostGator: I host various websites on dedicated servers with HostGator and they have by FAR the best tech support. When one of my client sites was infected last week, I fired off an email to tech support, they scanned the site, found a bunch of bugs and redirects, removed them, and all was well. No extra charge. Replies within an hour at the most. I can’t say enough about the tech team there. And then on my end, I was able to follow up with another scanning of email and file directories using my hosting admin area (cPanel)’s pre-loaded virus software. In less than 8 hours, this gigantic site was good to go. http://www.hostgator.com/
6. Password changes: The best thing you can do when you’ve had a virus is change the password of any admin accounts you have. This might just be the password to your blog, or your FTP password to your website. Anything that allows access to anything you’d like to keep clean should be changed. Easiest and least expensive way to help prevent a reoccurrence.
7. Reverting to a backup: If you have an infected website, your last/best hope is often to just revert to a recent backup. Even if you lose a few days or a week’s worth of work, it can sometimes be the best and easiest option. You still have to scan your website files for bugs in case you had a bug last week but it just hadn’t shown itself yet.
8. Making a backup before you’re infected: If you have just a basic HTML website, it’s easy to just download all your web files via FTP and save them in a safe place. If you have a database driven website such as a WordPress Blog or a Joomla website, you might want to look for a good backup plug-in. For Joomla, I use Akeeba backup plus I have my cPanel set to back up once a day, week and month. It has a great kickstart option and can also be used to create a development version of your site in a new folder if you want to test updates to your site. For WordPress, I rely on my cPanel server backup as well, but there’s likely a plug-in that could do the trick.
9. Call in help: Your least stressful option is usually to call in a good tech support person to help. Keep in mind that most tech support people will tell you the virus software you are running isn’t as good as their favourite. Doesn’t matter what you’re running, everyone swears by their own and ‘poo poo’s yours. No virus software is perfect. The odds are, you didn’t do anything wrong, so don’t let the bug or the techies get to you. If you run three different software suites, you sometimes catch things with one that you didn’t catch with the other. I run two. Avast – all the time – and Malwarebytes – once a week or every other week. Aside from that, the rest is in the hands of fate and of hackers who obviously have nothing better to do.
10. Re-format: If your infection has spread too far, too fast, reformatting your hard drive will fix the problem. Try to back up anything you can beforehand!
* There are countless other ways to prevent and disinfect. These are just my personal favourites. I also never EVER click on links from people I don’t recognize and I always look at the full URL before I do.
* McAfee may be a good antivirus suite too. I’ve heard good and bad things about it but have never run it on my own computer.
