virus

Norton finds High Risk Trojan Horse Viruses

Last year I trashed on Norton because it failed to protect my home computers from Malware Alarm, and instead gave props to Panda Antivirus.

A rep from Norton reached out to me a couple weeks ago, and asked if I'd give them a second chance with their new flagship program Norton 360. He said they'd greatly improved their focus on virus protection, and was confident that they'd addressed the issues I raised in my earlier review.

I'm all about second chances, so I downloaded and installed Norton 360 on both of my home computers - one that's used primarily by my kids upstairs for games, and my wife's laptop that she uses for email, shopping online, and of course Facebook. My Panda subscription had expired, so these machines had been running unprotected for a while. I was getting some windows error popups every time I started the kids computers - indicating that a file or memory address could not be accessed, and who knows what else had snuck onto those machines while browsing the web and playing online games (my kids tend to just click "Ok" whenever they see popups, a habit I'm trying to get them to stop).

After installing Norton, which includes a license for up to 3 computers, I ran a full scan to check for viruses, spyware, tracking cookies, malware - the works.

It turned out I had 4 trojan horse viruses lurking on my system, which Norton was able to detect and delete. Trojans are dangerous viruses that work secretly in the background to download and run fraudulent security tools, keyloggers, adware, web browser toolbars and other malicious applications.

My computer keeps locking up and runs slow

Question: My computer keeps locking up and runs quite a bit slower than it used to. Programs like Internet Explorer and MS Office freeze when I try to open them. Is it time to buy a new computer?

Answer: Before you go out and buy a new system, consider this: your computer's hardware hasn't changed (the processor, the memory, the hard drive, etc), so it's not likely the cause of the performance problems you're experiencing - which is good news because I'm sure you'd rather not shell out several hundred dollars for a new computer.

Chances are good that you have a virus that has infected your system and is slowing down performance.

How to find out if your system has been infected with a virus:

If you're experiencing performance problems and in particular are seeing weird behavior such as programs freezing or the system locking up, then it's time to scan your system for viruses (even if you have Norton or McAfee already installed - those programs are notorious for not knowing about the latest viruses).

I recently found a program that will scan your system and remove viruses for free. It's called AVG Free, and here's the download link: http://free.avg.com/

Here's what it found when it scanned my system:


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