We received our refurbished Dell last night. Supposed to run XP & Avast +other software. The kids unpacked and had it up and running in no time. They’ve been everywhere on it in a few hours before bed. I booted up this morning & checking antivirus find none installed. There is a disk here with the software that was promised. Should I run some kind of scan online before installing this disk? ???
Oh my, I wish I would have worked with them. Kids are 17yr twins and know much more than I do but missed this. What would you do next? Thanks!
Install avast, you will be asked at some point to do a boot-time scan when the system reboots, answer yes. This will do a scan before windows starts, so if you have picked up anything hopefully it should be detected before it can start.
You should also ensure that you have a firewall installed, essential and preferably one that has outbound protection. Whilst the windows XP firewall is usually good at keeping your ports stealthed (hidden) it provides no outbound protection and you should consider a third party firewall.
Any malware that manages to get past your defences will have free reign to connect to the internet to either download more of the same, pass your personal data (sensitive or otherwise, user names, passwords, keylogger retrieved data, etc.) or open a backdoor to your computer, so outbound protection is essential.
There are many freeware firewalls such as, Comodo, PCTools Firewall Plus, Jetico, etc. - Zone Alarm free works fine with avast and has a reasonably friendly user interface, however, the free version is becoming bloated with trial ware and is also crippled as far as outbound protection goes In the Program Control, configuration area, the slider will only goes as far as Medium protection, if you want more you have to buy the Pro version.
It would be worthwhile running some other tools (and keep them installed as back-up scanners to avast, something that you can update and run once a week):
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode (for the first scan) and report the findings (it should product a log file).
You will need to use Internet Explorer and possibly accept an ActiveX control. Delete anything it finds, particularly anything labeled with a red circle to the left or with the notation of “high risk.” Please post a log if anything like that is found.
Is Ewido still available it was mostly an excellent anti trojan
give it a try
It and Malware Bytes Anti Malware, Spybot, etc are in a different class of program that the On line Anti Virus programs mentioned
in addition to avast what real time anti spyware or anti-malware are we recommending today?
get an AV and firewall installed before connecting to the internet!
are you behind a firewall router?