Virus removal is a service that everyone needs from time to time. Even with the best antivirus & protection, and careful clicking, viruses and other malware can slip through and infect your computer, making it run slow, and compromising your privacy.
A few of our computer technicians have been removing viruses since the 1980s and we have become one of Denver’s leading virus removal teams. We can help get your computer back to working condition quickly.
This page is to help you recover from a virus or someone hacking into your computer.
Below are steps that you can try yourself, or you can bring your computer in for us to run the following steps and others using our in-house utilities, including a full 3-hour hardware diagnostic test. This usually costs about $120.
Steps take around 4-6 hours if you do this yourself. Or you can bring the computer in and we can use the utilities we built to run these steps -and more- simultaneously. This would be $200-$300 if it were an hourly appointment. We can do in our shop for a flat rate of $120 and we should have it back to you in 1 to 2 days (usually just 1)!
If “the bad guys” get into your computer:
Step 1. Remove any remote software from your computer. Go to your program settings and remove any of these programs that you see were recently installed. This takes just a few minutes per program. These are the most common ones we see:
Step 2. Get rid of obvious spyware issues quickly in less than 1 minute by removing unwanted browser toolbars, spyware, and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs). Click here to download and install the free tool, ADW Cleaner from Malwarebytes. www.malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner
This should take about 2 minutes to scan. “Quarantine” whatever it finds. We’ve never seen ADW Cleaner remove anything that it wasn’t supposed to.
Step 3. Next is to use Malwarebytes. It is the foremost company in the world for cleaning spyware. Their FREE program is REACTIVE, so it removes what is already there if it detects anything malicious or junk. If you pay for their PREMIUM version, it is PROACTIVE and helps prevent the spyware from getting on there in the first place. You can use the FREE version to remove spyware, and if you want, you can buy the annual plan for $40/year to help prevent future issues.
Download Malwarebytes from here. We’ve never seen it remove anything it shouldn’t so “Quarantine” whatever it finds. This takes 30 min-1 hour.
Step 4. Run a high-end corporate scan using one of these free scanners. Again, “Quarantine” or remove anything it detects. This takes about 1 hour. Download one of these:
Step 5. Make sure all your updates are done. This will decrease the number of security holes in your system for this to happen again. Here’s a video of how to do updates on Windows 10. This could take a few hours to get them all downloaded and installed. You will need to restart a few times.
Step 6. Check for Malicious Extensions in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. These are not detected by any of the previous steps. Each browser has a different location to check for which extension is installed. Google your browser and “extensions” to find out how to remove them. This just takes a few minutes.
Optional Steps:
Step 7. Make sure the hackers didn’t turn off your System Restore points which help get you back up and running quickly in case of a crash. Open the Windows Start menu, type in ‘Restore’. Open the option to “Create a Restore Point.” In the resulting window, if protection for your drive is On, great! You’re all set. If it’s off, you can turn it back on in that same menu.
Step 8. Use Disk Cleanup to remove junk files and previously downloaded copies of Windows Updates (this takes about 30 minutes)
Step 9. Download CCleaner and clean the registry of bad files, more junk files, and startup items.
Step 10. If you gave the hackers your passwords, you need to start changing them! It takes about 15 minutes per password!
We would be happy to do all this for you! Just bring it by! No need for an appointment.
More tips on staying PROACTIVE in the future:
Always check the sender’s address! A way people often get scammed is from shady emails that claim they are from your email provider or some company you may have an account for, like Amazon. Generally, if these companies wanted to contact you, they’d either do it while you’re logged into their respective website or by sending you an email from their website. For example, a legitimate Amazon email would come from an address like ‘support@amazon.com’.
Even still, smarter scammers can mask their address. So as a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious of ANY email that asks you to log back into an account, click on a link, or download an attachment unless you remember yourself directly requesting such actions. If you’re even slightly suspicious of an email, the safest thing to do is delete it!
Only call the OFFICIAL number! Another common scam we see is when something appears to lock your computer down, often accompanied by annoying beeping, or some robot voice saying there’s a problem with your computer. These are a common scare tactic we have seen many times, usually trying to scare you into calling some phone number pulled up on the screen. If you see something like this, DO NOT CALL THE NUMBER!
Scammers often like to pose as Microsoft support, so here’s something to keep in mind: It is very hard to reach the legitimate Microsoft support help line. In order to get in contact with Microsoft, you have to go through their automated Help process and talk to a robot in a chat window. Eventually it will give up and ask for YOUR phone number and THEY will call YOU. Many other tech companies like Google have a similar process.
As another general guideline, only call a number for a company if you can find it on their official website. (This means no Googling “number for human at comcast”!)
Companies use SpellCheck! One possible way to get around spam email filters is by adding special characters or purposely misspelling words. To a computer, ‘Antivirus’,’Antivrus’, and ‘A_ntivirus’ are three completely different words. YOU SHOULD BE SUSPICIOUS OF MECHANICAL ERRORS! It should be reasonable to assume that most major companies, Amazon, Xfinity, Google, etc. take a minute or two to proofread their emails.
Watch out for gift cards! It seems there is a black market for gift cards online, as scammers have been using them to launder money more and more. It should be common sense that NO LEGITIMATE COMPANY WILL ACCEPT PAYMENT IN GIFT CARDS, NO MATTER WHAT SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCE THEY MAY CLAIM. You should be instantly suspicious whenever the idea of payment in gift cards may arise.
This extends to messages from your contacts too: Another prevalent scam nowadays is when one of your friends emails you something like “Hello, hope you’re doing well. Do you order from Amazon?” Eventually after responding, they will try to convince you to send them the codes for gift cards because they can’t buy it due to some excuse. You should be wary right away if it’s someone you barely know or haven’t spoken to in years, but if it is one of your closer friends, you can always call them and see if they meant to ask for that. Odds are, they didn’t and you can then delete their message. (And possibly put them in touch with us for a hacking remediation appointment!) If people have been receiving messages like this from you, your email has likely been compromised. Please contact us ASAP!
If you ever notice something like these described happening to you, or anything else suspicious for that matter, you can give us a call to schedule an appointment to remotely address the issue (Cost varies on time, generally $100/hour) or bring in your computer for our $120 flat rate spyware removal process.