Although I am usually careful with my mails, surfing habits, and installed the latest anti-virus + anti-spam + anti-phishing + anti-spyware + world class software firewall on my PC, that does not stop all the virus from getting inside my harddisk.
During a routine scan which I just completed, my anti-virus scanner managed to find and remove what is in fact an old virus called Trojan.Zlob – aka Zhopa previously – and is an old friend of mine (ok, I am kidding)
I did a checkup at my favourite anti-virus website, and found the following summary:
Trojan.Zlob is a back door Trojan that allows the remote attacker to perform various malicious actions on the compromised computer.
Hmm… I didn’t get any attack, but the following was received in the report on my PC, which states that it has changed 73]]> registry entries, added 6 files, and 1 browser cache. For some reason I think the virus came in through the browser cache or when I installed something from the web (see, everybody makes mistake sometimes).
In fact, I am still quite surprised why my anti-virus software has failed to detect this virus.
My recommendation is that you should perform a system-wide scan at least once a fortnight. Some may recommend more frequent scanning depending on how you use your PC. A great time to do a system wide scan is during lunch (office PC) or dinner time (home PC). If you have a large HDD with large number of files, it might take the whole evening to complete. It may be troublesome but necessary.
The above picture is to remind myself and to scare you so that all of us will perform routine anti-virus scan and update our virus definition.
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