Heavily infected PC Results with Ewido

Some relatives stayed the weekend and brought their computer for me to clean up. They have 2 teenagers and Norton has been expired for about 9 months. It was obviously polluted with Adware so I uninstalled Norton and went as follows-

Installed NOD32 and it was going crazy finding Adware and Trojans upon bootup and during a scan. I let it clean, but while NOD32 was excellent at detection, it wasn't great at cleaning up this big of a mess.

Next, installed Sunbelt Counterspy and did a scan. It found hundreds of infections, but again, the cleaning was insufficient (after reboot Trojans and Adware would still be found in memory).

Finally, installed Ewido and scanned. It found 192 malware items, and after cleaning, it said it cleaned 192 items. Reboot and done. Malware gone.

My conclusion- NOD32 is excellent first line of defense and would probably keep a clean system from getting infected with Adware and Trojans in the first place. I also concluded that Ewido is an excellent Spyware/Adware/Trojan remover and was better than anything I have ever used for this purpose. Ewido saved this PC.

I will likely keeping using NOD32 and periodically scan with Ewido as a backup on my own PCs. But what about my visitors who didn't know anything about PC security-

I told them about layered security and setup them up for now with free apps that are easy to learn-

AVG Free Antivirus (much better than nothing and very easy to use for newbies)
Zone Alarm Free (Again easy to use) plus I told them how this could prevent trojan downloaders, etc. if they denied unknown applications.
and finally Ewido free (but since they have no real time spyware/adware protection, I recommended that they should consider purchasing Ewido)
Also, introduced them to Firefox and took the IE icon off of their desktop.

 

I agree! After finding some "harmless" cookies and starting a help thread here on how to remove them (see link) I to am happy I purchased this product.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=121147

 

For the free Antivirus, Avast is much better IMHO

http://www.avast.com/

 

You may want to see this: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ The Certification Level is their most meaningful criteria, with "Advanced+" being the best.

 

AVG Free does not offer protection against adware/spyware, so some realtime protection from ewido and/or Counterspy would be a good idea.

No point in always trying to clean up the mess with demand scans after the junk gets entrenched on your system, even ewido can't be guaranteed do that!

 

Well, even if Avast offers better protection, AVG is easier to use IMO and that was part of the decision to go with it. Also, no registration is required- just install and register within the program unlike AVAST that requires a key to be sent to your email. I did point out that they didn't have real time protection for adware/spyware, which is the reason I recommended that they actually purchase Ewido for that feature. Ewido easily beat the other spyware scanners in this real world test.

Bottom line- they are happy and have a clean PC and without Ewido, this wouldn't have happended. From what I have seen from NOD32, it would do a good job of keeping a system clean since it had no problem detecting the adware/spyware, but Ewido did a better cleanup job.

Personally my lineup will be NOD32 (realtime and scanner), Sunbelt Kerio Firewall with HIPS enabled, and periodic Ewido scans as a backup.

 

I did the same thing this weekend...

They had NAV with no firewall! lol

They didn't have the OS disk or I would have just reinstalled.

1st I ran CCleaner to get rid of some debris.
Then Ewido, it found over 5000 things!!!!
Then NOD32, it found 8 virus/trojans.
Then ad-aware & spybot found about 20 items combined
Then Hijackthis, Rootkitrevealer, unhackme, etc etc and all re-done in safe mode.

In the end - they finally had a clean system.
I left them with =
Avast free, Boclean (my paid version since I bought ewido),
Kerio fw (pw protected so they can't take it off).
+ ie spyad, spyblaster, etc


joy joy

 

One thought was did you boot into safe mode when you cleaned with the various programs? Many times thats the best or even only way to remove some viruses, trojans, spyware etc.

 

No mention of system restore being turned of either before doing scans.

 

my uncle thinks aol anti spyware will save him *ROFFLES* he has an outdated firefox and won't let me update and his computer freezes every 20 mins. oh and he has norton 2002. he thinks if i install and clean his computer it won't work. i tried telling him but he won't listen. oh well

 

Interesting experiment, but for any system that infected, I'd do a clean install of the operating system. (Which, to me, qualifies as stating the obvious.)

 

Doing a reinstall wasn't an option in this case. I did clear the system restore, but did not need to go into safe mode. Bottom line, Ewido effectively cleaned the machine that was heavily infected beyond belief, and it worked better than the so-called dedicated antispy programs. I think that this says wonders for Ewido's cleaning ability. I think that the NOD32 (first line of defense) and Ewido (periodic backup scans) combo are pretty good.

 

thanks for the positive feedback about ewido, rav..