Buy an anti-spyware software, is that enough?

Struck Again!

So what if I have a paid version of McAfee VirusScan Plus which is supposed to deal with viruses,
trojans and spyware and all that jazz. And what if I made sure McAfee was frequently updated so that it had the latest databases. Well, that just ain't enough!

I found this the hard way a few days back when my PC started becoming slower and slower up a point where it was pretty useless. It would boot into XP and then would just sit there with the hourglass turning. There would be a random message saying my PC was infected and it needed to perform a scan and this wasn't from McAfee, I had a visitor or visitors in my PC!

The only way to go was to boot into safe mode, because in normal mode it just sat there with a busy
mouse pointer. So restart the PC, press F8 while restarting and select 'safe mode with networking'. So I am in safe mode and now I have to figure out what program to run.

I did have Malwarebyte's Anti-malware installed, but that wouldn't open up. So I finally found a tool
called "avenger.exe" which would run from safe mode (a lot of the other utilities wouldn't). It asked me to reboot the PC in order to continue the process. It then rebooted into normal mode and I got a message from avenger saying it had found some stuff and had cleaned it. So now, I was in a position to run malwarebyte's anti-malware which found a ton of other stuff in my PC. Had it clean all those up. Took off Mcafee, downloaded and installed Avast free version and I am back in form again.

Moral of the story, viruses/trojans now are much more sophisticated that what we had years before. So arm yourself with all the best ammunition you can gather (tools like Avenger etc).

Have a root kit free 2009!