Norton Anti-Virus

Introduction

For various reasons, I use Norton AV, now owned and distributed by Symantec.

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

• Symantec Security Response
• Norton Support Home page
• Removing Trojan Horses at the Symantec site
• Virus/Spyware Removal a premium service
• How to update virus definition files using the Intelligent Updater
• Dell Community Forums
• AVG Anti Virus, a free virus and malware scannner.
• Windows Defender, from Microsoft

Keywords: "Windows XP" virus Norton Antivirus NAV AVG trojan backdor