Tips And Guides

A guy at work yesterday brought in his computer from home for me to look at. He said he was having some problems, slowness, popups, etc…..so I said I would take a look. Man, come to find out it was his sons from college. Talk about a mess of sites you probably do not want your son looking at. Besides that, though, he had that annoying little icon in the system tray, right beside the clock, that just keeps blinking. If you click on it, it goes to an affiliate site for a virus and antispyware remover software. If this has happened to you, your computer has been hijacked!! This is how to remove a system tray virus alert.

The following are the steps I took to clean up his computer:

1. First off, I wanted to get rid of all of the “college surfing” files and folders, so I used an Internet History Eraser. This software will run a scan of your computer and tell you how many things can be erased. This is especially good for cleaning up the hard drive from pictures, videos, and songs. It ended up clearing about 4GB worth of room. This gave me a clean slate from within Internet Explorer.
2. Secondly, I ran a Registry Repair Software. I did this to get rid of any other errors that are out there, messing with the speed of the computer, and more of the computer errors. You need to make sure you are on a certain level of operational capability with a computer before you just start removing and searching for viruses. This software found over 1,000 errors. So, we got those all cleaned up.
3. He was using Avast for his anti-virus software. Avast is pretty good, until you let it expire. Always keep the ant-virus software up to date, especially if it is free. So, i uninstalled it, downloaded it on my other computer, and re-installed it (see, at work, we can not hook up any other computers on the network, so I had to use my computer to download software and transfer over via USB Jumpdrives). Avast is pretty good, as it will let you run a scan from a start up, which should catch some of the viruses before they launch into programs. Avast found an additional 48 infected files and removed them.
4. On the restart, that annoying little icon was still in the system tray. At that point, I knew his computer had been hijacked. This means he had downloaded something, which had a virus attached to it. It then imbeds itself into your computer, and runs like a regular program. These little guys are very hard to find and get rid of.
5. There are plenty of forums on the internet, which can help you with problems such as these. There is a HijackThis script that you can download and run on your computer, which will give you a list of all the possible programs running right now on your computer which might be the culprit. I downloaded this, and generated a script. I then scanned the script and found the infected files. If you can not find the files, then join the forum, and post your hijack list in the forum. Someone will help you from there.
6. Since I knew the file, I knew the fix. The fix for this is called SmitFraudFix.
   1. Download this onto your desktop
   2. Do not click on it yet.
   3. Restart your computer in Safe Mode. Depending on the computer you have, you will need to press F8, or F3, or F2 during the start up to get to this screen. Once you are there, click on the safe mode and start the computer in safe mode.
   4. Once the computer is up and running in Safe mode, then click on the SmitFraudFix button.
   5. Click on #2 when it launches.
   6. When it is done, it will ask you if you want it to fix the registry. Answer Yes and continue.
   7. When it is done, restart the computer in normal start up mode. The infected files will be gone, as was the case with the computer I was working on.

That was it. He now had a clean computer, and probably saved a bunch of money by having me do it instead of taking it to the box stores and having them do it. This is basically how I removed a system tray virus alert.

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