Think you may have a virus? Don;’t know what to do? This is what the consultants in Software Support use: Combofix.
Many computers come in in various states of viral siege. The exploits have slipped past the anti-virus software. It doesn’t matter which. We see computers that are infected, with all kinds of AV software running, and up to date. Free or Paid. Enterprise or Consumer. They have been rendered useless by the latest generation of exploits, which somehow get in, and bury themselves so they can’t be seen under normal operating conditions. Theoretically, you could boot in Safe Mode, and you should be able to see everything, but where would you look?
Enter Combofix. There are times when there will be 4 or 5 people in a row in software Support, all at some stage of a virus cleaning with the use of Combofix. We don’t know how it works. The people at Bleeping Computer don’t want those secrets loose in the black-hat community. What we do see is many computers coming in compromised, and walking out clean.
Follow the links to obtain Combofix, along with instructions for use. One step we at Software Support don’t do is install the Recovery Console, one of the early steps in the process. It won’t cause any harm, but it will cause your computer to offer you to choose between the Recovery Console and Windows every time you boot thereafter.
Another point of interest is that when Combofix is done, it opens a log file for you to examine. The typical computer user will not understand this log. Bleeping Computer does not post any explanation of the log or how it is to be used. They just tell you to send it to them for analysis. If you don’t wnat to deal with it, you can just close it. It will remain in your computer, right in the C:\ directory, for future viewing. Often, just running Combofix will be sufficient to take care of the whole job, especially if you took remedial action right away. But sometimes there are things you need to do to follow up, and this is usually indicatedin the log. We have learned to read the log file, so if simply running Combofix doesn’t do it for you, you can bring it to Software Support.
So if you don’t want to come here for help, you intrepid users can try it yourself. after using this seemingly miraculous program for the past 6 or 7 months, we have not seen any significant problems with running it, and feel that the everyday computer user can use it safely. That being said, you should take note of Bleeping Computer‘s warnings to the contrary and decide for yourself. They make it sound pretty scary. When in doubt, save your important files to CD or some external media first.
