Last week we received a call from an anxious Accountant from a West Midlands based Accounting Firm. Their work was being interrupted by annoying pop-ups with error messages. More to the point these pop-ups had started right after the user had opened an email and clicked on a link to an apparent Anti-Virus… Not sounding good so far, eh?

We work with a number of Accounting Firms and it is particularly important that their data is protected due to the fact it contains scores of their clients’ confidential financial information. The Accountant feared the worst – that their PC had been severely compromised.

Technical Engineer Rashid took the call and connected remotely to the PC to take a look at the pop-ups. Due to the content of these pop-ups it was evident that a virus has indeed infected the PC. He set about running a Virus Scan to try to detect and control the virus but the scan did not pick this up – this usually means that the virus has been intelligently created to bypass basic scans.

After checking the system settings and common locations he found traces of the virus. This particular virus was an application virus – one that spreads by installing software onto a PC. It disables all access to the system’s configuration settings and can even disable the legitimate Anti-Virus software within a basic account.

Rashid then tried using a feature called System Restore which is built into Windows. It is designed so that if the system becomes unstable due to system changes it can be restored to a previous, stable version. He used the feature to successfully revert the system back to a pre-virus state. ‘What about all of the Accountant’s work?!’ I hear you cry! The system was restored without affecting any documents, pictures or any other data that the user had been working on post-attack.

Nice one! Another happy customer.

The moral of the story is: Be aware! Our Help Desk receive many calls like this one because unfortunately, the number of incidences where viruses hiddene within emails have been introduced to a network is still on the rise.
So be aware! Do not open emails or click on links from people you do not know or do not trust. If you suspect your PC is infected with a virus give the Supreme Team a call on: 0121 3090060.