You're Infected With a Virus! Now What?

There are a lot of good antivirus programs that perform very well at catching and stopping viruses and other malware before they infect your computer. But what do you if your computer does get infected? How do you remove the malware?

AV-Comparatives.org recently published a Malware Test Removal report on sixteen of the most popular antivirus programs and their ability to remove malware and potentially dangerous "leftovers" from an infected system. The results were disappointing in that none of the antivirus systems performed very well in this respect.

None of the products performed "very good" in malware removal or removal of leftovers, based on those 10 samples. eScan, Symantec and Microsoft (MSE) were the only products to be good in removal of malware AND removal of leftovers.

Until the removal piece of the antivirus software catches up to the detection piece, we are left to rely upon the computer professionals and backups to protect our information assets.