For various reasons, I use Norton AV, now owned and distributed by Symantec. This was first written in 2008, and a year later I moved to Citihub where other anti-virus products were in use. I stopped using it about then. I have marked this page as deprecated.

Bastards

One of my computers has been infected by a virus propagated by that famous spam peitre dish, Microsoft Messenger. So how to clean it up. For some reason, Norton seemed to miss it.

What I did!

Fortunately, one of our correspondents was able to tell me that AVG described the virus as named BackDoor.Generic9.pew. Norton seem to name it as Trojan. Neither Google nor Symantec seem to recognise the name easily.

On booting the system, and logging in, Symantec was discovering the virus, but not successfully quarantining it. Liveupdate seemed to be infected. After trying a Liveupdate, the internet became unavailable, and it failed. On research it seems that it is possible to update the virus files without LiveUpdate, but not it seems without the internet, although I’ll have to find that out another time.

I entered Safe Mode and ran Norton Antivirus scan. This failed to find the virus, which I discovered when I rebooted (to unsafe mode). I then installed AVG Antivirus, using a USB stick and ran a scan, this seems to have cleaned up the system.

As it happens, I didn’t use the Dell Community Forums this time

Some important Links

Keywords: “Windows XP” virus Norton Antivirus NAV AVG trojan backdor

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