Currently, it’s cold and flu season — but the truth is that your computer can come down with a nasty virus any time of year. Whether you are suffering from a serious case of infected files or you want to take precautions against the malware striving to do damage to your digital system, read on for a few different strategies for combatting computer corruption.
Install an Antivirus Tool
This is both a preventative measure and an emergency solution. Quality antivirus security software is built to identify known and unknown malware before viruses insinuate themselves onto your device and in the midst of an attack.
Antivirus tools are so imperative for keeping your system safe because they utilize several methods for monitoring virus activity. First, most antivirus tools have a library of known malware signatures, or bits of code unique to those programs, which they use to search for, recognize and thwart malware before it can get a fingerhold. Next, the latest antivirus tools use heuristic techniques to test unfamiliar programs and identify malware. Sometimes, antivirus software will run a copy of the program in a virtual environment to keep the device safe. Other times, the antivirus will watch how the program unpacks itself and what files it runs, looking for known malicious behaviors.
You might think of antivirus solutions as the vitamin-C of cyber defenses: It bolsters your digital immune system to ward off infection, and it also strengthens the system and helps fight off an ongoing attack.
Boot From a Backup
It should go without saying that you need to backup your device on a regular basis — what how often that depends on whom you ask. Some experts advocate setting up automatic backups every 24 hours, while others say you only need to backup your computer when you create a new file you truly cannot stand to lose. Whether you backup via the cloud or onto an external hard drive is up to you, but you should make a habit of backing up your entire device.
The reason for this is simple: If your device succumbs to a malware infection, you can simply boot up your most recent backup, which shouldn’t contain the malware. It’s essentially like hitting an “undo” button — it lets you go back in time to before you clicked on that suspicious email attachment or navigated to that shady website. As long as you have a relatively recent backup to rely on — and as long as you don’t fall victim to a sleeper-style malware — this solution works.
Reformat Your Device
Formatting is the process of preparing a drive to be used by an operating system. Back in the day, when floppy disks were the only way to store data, the disks always required formatting (or reformatting) before they could be used for data storage because the computer needed to arrange the magnetic markings in the disk properly. Today, hard drives don’t require physical formatting, but users can choose to logically reformat a file system. Doing so erases any data stored in that section of the drive — making formatting a common solution when users are grappling with a particularly tenacious piece of malware.
Formatting is an incredibly drastic action for ridding yourself of malware, so it is unwise for you to jump to this option right out of the gate. While reformatting your device will delete the malware, it will also delete any other data you have saved on that drive. Still, if you have tried everything and still cannot shake a pesky malware infection, you might make a backup and try reformatting your device.
Remove the Virus Manually
Last but certainly not the least time- and energy-intensive, is manual removal of your infection. Malware is a program like any other, and deleting critical pieces of that malware will hamper its ability to run on your device. Typically, manual removal requires you to enter your computer’s registry, which is its core database for the operating system and installed programs. All you do is delete the items in the registry pertaining to the malware, and you will overcome the infection immediately.
Unfortunately, the registry is anything but easy to understand, meaning it is incredibly easy to irreparable harm not just the malware on your device but your device as a whole. If you have only basic computer experience, it is best to avoid tooling around in the registry; instead, you might send your device to an expert to remove the malware for you.
If your computer is coughing and sneezing — i.e. it is slowing down, offering strange pop-ups or otherwise acting strangely — it might have come down with a virus. Fortunately, you have a few solutions to get it back to peak health in no time, plus avoid infections into the future.
