Wednesday, February 18, 2009

How to Kill a Trojan Virus on Bootup

My mother in law bless her heart has always had problems with viruses and spy ware infecting her PCs. This is despite her having anti-virus programs installed.

She had a Trojan on her PC. This Trojan is so smart that it actually prevents new anti-virus programs from being installed. The only way to kill it is to boot from a CD on before it has a chance to load. The problem with most emergency disks available is that they are old and cannot kill the latest and greatest viruses or deal with NTFS partitions.

After a lot of research here are the tools that I tried on her PC to kill the virus:
  • Avira Rescue CD - This is a free bootable CD that can kill viruses. They update it hourly.
  • Kapersky Anti-Virus CD - Another bootable CD that can kill viruses. They update it around once per week.
  • Ultimate Boot CD for Windows - This one is a bootable XP CD (you need your XP install disk to create it). It has numerous anti-virus and anti-spyware programs that can update with the latest virus signatures. You must use Windows XP to create the CD. It doesn't run under Vista. However it can run under a Virtual PC with Windows XP.
To burn the CDs you will need an ISO burner such as ImgBurn


FYI, here are some dead ends that I ran into:
  • McAfee has no such thing as a recent Emergency Disk that can deal with NTFS volumes.
  • Norton has no such thing as a recent Emergency Disk that can deal with NTFS volumes.
  • The original Ultimate Boot CD is a DOS bootable CD that has ancient McAfee Anti Virus on it. Worthless.
  • Trinity Rescue Kit is a Linux bootable CD that contains no Anti-Virus Software.

The outcome:

  • Avira Rescue CD could not kill the virus, it simply renamed it.
  • I was never able to create the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Neither a virtual machine or a regular Windows XP desktop worked. It always gave an obscure error.
  • Kapersky Anti-Virus is the clear winner. It was able to delete the virus. The PC is running full speed again and my mother in law is happy.

Some questions that I still need to answer:

  • It would be nice to figure out how to get the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot with a USB drive. It would be great I could simply boot up and get the latest anti-virus definitions instead of burning a new CD every time.
  • It would be nice to figure out how to get the AVGFree Version 8 as a plug in to the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Version 7.5 is included currently.

Here are some links I found to make a USB drive bootable:
http://www.nu2.nu/mkbt/
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/index.php

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or there's always the other option

http://www.apple.com/mac/

:-)

Rachat de credit said...

Instructions like this are helpful, now to kill a trojan virus on bootup is an easy task with the help of your recommendations. Thank you