Virus & Malware Removal London

The first thing worth saying is that most machines we are called out to for a virus do not have one. The great majority of what people describe as an infection is either adware and a hijacked browser — a search engine that has been swapped, a toolbar that will not leave, ads appearing on sites that never had them — or it is not on the machine at all, just a web page designed to look like a system warning. If a full-screen alert appeared while you were browsing, gave a phone number to call, and will not close, that is a scareware page rather than a virus, and the machine is usually untouched. Closing the tab and clearing the browser resolves it. We would rather tell you that in five minutes than bill you for a clean-up you never needed.

Where there is a real infection, the work is in finding what makes it persist, not in running a scanner. On Windows that means the scheduled tasks, services and registry run keys that reinstate the payload after every reboot, plus the browser extensions and proxy settings that survive an uninstall. On a Mac it is launch agents and daemons, and above all configuration profiles — the mechanism most Mac adware now uses to lock a browser homepage in place, and the reason a Mac "cleaner" app people have already tried never fixes it. We work through those by hand rather than trusting a single tool, then verify the machine boots clean rather than assuming it does.

The part that matters most comes after the machine is clean, and it is the part most often skipped. If something has been running on your computer with your permissions, the real exposure is not the machine — it is your saved passwords, your email and anything with a card attached. We will tell you honestly what the malware we found was actually capable of, which accounts are worth changing passwords on as a precaution, and where turning on two-factor authentication closes the door properly. Many of these jobs can be handled remotely over a secure screen-share on the same day, so if the machine still boots and connects, you may not need a visit at all.