Trojan removal

Somehow some spyware had found its way past AVG and Spyware Doctor and neither of them is able to remove it even by booting into safe mode and running them...the spyware is still there after booting normally.

Any recommendations for a utility to remove trojans...it looks like there are a bunch of them -.-

The Microsoft one (Windows Defender) is pretty good.

If you have any more specifics about which spyware program or what it is that you're seeing, you may have more luck finding a cleaner that can get rid of it.

Create a bootable disc in Win98 and boot up with it and then remove it?

Most likely the filesystem will be NTFS, which Windows 98 can't read. Ran into that little 'gotcha' myself when trying a Win95 boot disk on a computer using the Win98 FAT32 system...

Anyway, some other things to check for if spyware exhibits itself even in safe mode:
- Many of them embedd themselves as IE plugins, which can get activated as soon as you launch internet explorer... So even in safe mode, as soon as you start IE there's a chance you have 'bonus' programs in memory.
- Some of the particulary nasty ones install themselves as a service or as a fake driver under windows, and mark themselves as essential/critical -- meaning that they will get loaded upon startup even in safe mode.
(I've seen one pretend to be a network adapter driver on my own system years ago. Those can look perfectly legit, until you realize you don't actually have the piece of hardware associated with it installed in your computer)

Fun, eh?

Yeh it's all good fun ^^

This is a WinXPProf system.

The malware does not activate in safe mode as far as I know, its just that spyware doc and agv cannot remove them even in safemode...spyware doc identifies 18 different malwares O.o

I will look at win defender and also specific trojan removers once I've written their names down and if that doesn't work I'll have to restore the drive from a backup made in august.

Why is it that antivirus/spyware products often don't work?...time for a refund!? ;)

Thanks for the advice ;)

another freebie you can try:

http://housecall.antivirus.com

free online scan + removal of many nasties.

Looks like its going to be format time!

Windows Defender alas didn't find anything wrong with my PC and housecall found but could not remove alot of things.

I've just bought a 320GB external drive to back all my data up to and then I'm going to do a fresh install and afterwards remember to ghost my main drive more regularly ^^

Be careful about what you are removing - some things that flag up as malware (in general) are, in fact, not malware at all.

Some things get past antivirus and aniti-malware software purely because that software has purposeley allowed it (for correct reasons). Some of the less-professional anti-whatever apps can flag up a lot of things as malware because they are suspicious - even if they have a file name that matches previous malware - such as 'oblivion' - which also happens to be a well-known computer game exe file.


The best anti-malware program is this:

http://www.webroot.com/uk/products/spysweeper/?WRSID=8bd201d0e922a2763591cdc1a0c78475