WELCOME TO
THE COHENS WEBSITE
AT ROOTSWEB

I hope that my friends and family will take the virus and spam precautions outlined in our main Computer Tips page, and never need to read this page. That means, besides installing virus protection software, avoiding opening spam email, make sure you make regular complete backups and keep them in more than one secure place, so if your computer gets infected, you might be able to recover your system and the compromised files you need, more easily.

The rest of this page is geared towards those unfortunate folks who find their computer to be infected with some kind of malware.

What Would I do?

If my computer was getting used in a zombie network or was reported as generating spam, I would immediately download and install the malware protection software mentioned above, or update the software I already had.

I then would disconnect it from the Internet and my ISP to keep from doing more harm, run the virus-protection software, and use a friend's computer to read the following article. It is aimed towards students at Purdue University, but provides an excellent summary of the steps you need to take to recover.

http://www.purdue.edu/securepurdue/steam/help/view.cfm?KBTopicID=211

The bad news is you may have to consider enlisting the assistance of a professional to rid your computer of the malware, unless you don't care about completely wiping out all the files on it and taking it back to the factory settings. You cannot be sure when it was attacked or which files have been compromised. Even if Norton, McAfee and AVG say they have gotten rid of everything bad, I would still be nervous about whether they caught everything.

If you are technically inclined and want to try to rid your computer of the virus, trojan horse, or whatever, yourself, be sure to take advantage of the great forums and technical chat rooms available, as well as consulting knowledgable friends. If you decide to pay a professional, or take your computer into the nearest computer store for diagnosis and repair, make sure you don't get taken advantage of. Shop around and compare prices. And check out places like http://www.geeksquad.com, XXX URL to bestbuy geeksquad goes here which will quote you a price and stick to it, and also may be able to perform the repairs over your high speed internet connection, at a lower cost than if they sent a technician for a home visit.

If you do a lot of surfing on the Web, or tend to open up a lot of email from strangers, you might consider changing to a browser, email client, and operating system with lower security risks. Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, and text browsers such as Lynx and Links are lower security risks than Internet Explorer.

But if you are an MS Windows user, you still are a prime target for malware if you download email instead of just reading it on the web with a non-standard browser. You might consider looking around for a GUI-based user-friendly Linux system. Most Linux systems are techie-oriented, but there are some Linux distributions that are just as user-friendly as Windows. And, even better yet, Linux software is free.