It's a nice sunny afternoon... but I'm buried in my computer finishing an important presentation. While innocently browsing to gather information, I am suddenly unable to access any website!  This is my true story from last Friday.

I check my network cables, reset my network adapters, do a bunch of things desperately seeking to get back on the Internet. I'm confident I can get things working soon, after all I have kept my PC in good condition and protected with state of the art anti-virus software.

An hour passes... and I haven’t gotten anywhere.  It is time to call in the experts. What happened next was truly educational for me. My IT expert takes one look and decides there is a virus. (How is that possible?, my anti-virus scanner didn’t pick it up and it is the #1 in the market).

Rather than run a series of time consuming scans, he uses a number of expert tools (such as Sysinternals). First he looks into the Windows system folder and identifies a number of potential culprits. Next he uses a utility that shows all network connections and voila he can see some activity on the network that should not be there (which explains why I couldn’t browse any websites - the virus was eating up all my bandwidth in performing its nefarious activities). Finally he is able to isolate the program that is causing this.

Jumping to remediation, the first thing he did was isolate the virus from the network by terminating the program that was causing the illicit network activity.  He next isolated the program and rendered it toothless by removing all permissions and access for that program.  Finally he cleared out the files and registry entries for that virus. Sounds easy, but when I look at what he has done it is hard for me to distinguish the virus from other legitimate files and programs!

It has taken less than 15 minutes, remarkable considering a full anti-virus scan would have required a couple of hours to run. More importantly, the anti-virus software had yet to receive the latest virus definition updates which would have helped it identify and destroy the virus. Anti-virus software is important but even the best AV software can't stop every virus.  New viruses are being created 24 hours a day and virus software definition files simply can't be updated quickly enough to catch every piece of malware.

If you ever notice your computer acting strangely whether it is loss of functionality, lots of pop-ups, extremely slow performance or, like in my case, blocked access to the Internet - then it may be time to call in our expert Solution Engineers at www.support.com. They can help you kill viruses that your anti-virus software may not yet be aware of!