I have noticed a great number of system "Glitches" as of late. Recently while poking around explorer, i believe in my system32 dir, i noticed that every time I entered a subdirectory and existing to main dire, an "icon or file thumbnail" would flash on screen for an instant before disappearing completely. Later the same day, and since then, I have noticed a great many other disturbances on my pc. Such as; system hangs constantly (requiring taskmgr), loginui(sp?) failing, strange file types in my prefetch directory, and many more that i am quite frankly to tired to list. I know without a doubt that at least one logger, possibly up to six, have been installed on my pc, but i haven't the slightest idea of their filenames. To add insult to injury, my wife thought to help me out by deleting ALL of my pre-issue backups and images on both my hd and ext-hd and creating new backups with current files and structure. Is there anything I can do, or at least a way to save some of our more important documents and pictures without infecting a new/re-installed os? Fyi I'm running win 8.1, trend micro full pkg(all bells n whistles)
1 Answers
The title of the question is rather clear. The text of the question is not. I'm presuming that the actual question is, "How do I find all the keyloggers?"
The answer: there is no clearly definite way of doing so. There is no magical command that is guaranteed to work. The reason why there is no strightforward guaranteed way is because the malicious software can modify your computer's behavior. For instance, the malicious software can alter the functionality of the "show files" operation, or an operation to "delete malicious file". Malicious code could hide the malicious file(s), or show the files and then falsely report that they were deleted. Simply looking at the screen is not a way that you can certainly tell the difference between authentic Microsoft Windows code, or malicious code that does a pixel-perfect job of looking like the real thing.
This concept is famously discussed in "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (PDF), a paper by Ken Thompson, who created the C programming language and worked on Unix during its early existence.
You can try to fight your way through it. The generalized step is typically use use anti-malware ("anti-virus") software, some of which might provide a command line interface. There are cases where such software can effectively clean a system. Effectiveness of any single piece of software can vary; newer malicious software tends to be improving in ability to be challenging for anti-malware software to detect (and clean).
Other than that, the next simplest approach, which has a higher chance of working, is often to re-install the operating system.
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