Hacked PC; You opened an attachment from your email and your computer has started to crawl. Not only that, but strange things start to happen. Your bank called you saying there was some strange activity on your account and your ISP seems to be cutting off internet to your computer because they claim it is a slave to some botnet.
If your computer has been hacked and infected with a virus, you should take action immediately. You'll probably want to keep your files and prevent attackers from using your computer to attack other computers. Below are 10 basic steps you should take immediately.
1. Isolate your computer
Disconnect, it is a tool in the hands of the hacker who moves threads. you need to isolate your system in such a way that it cannot communicate with the network. Isolation will save your other computers and lock out the hacker. Simply pull the network cable from your computer and disable the Wi-Fi connection. If you have a laptop, there is a switch that disables the Wi-Fi. Do not do this with any software, as the hacker's malware may have anticipated this.
2. Turn off the pc, remove the hard drive and connect it to another computer as a non-bootable disk
Shut down your computer and remove the infected hard drive. Connect the drive to another computer as a secondary non-bootable drive. Make sure the other computer has up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware. Also download a free rootkit scanner from a reputable source, such as Sophos.
If you don't want to remove your hard drive, or don't have a spare computer, immediately take the infected machine to a reputable PC repair shop.
3. Scan your disk
Use the other computer's anti-virus, anti-spyware, and rootkit scanner to detect and remove any infections from your hard drive.
4. Back up your important files
Take your personal data and only that. Copy your photos, documents, videos, or anything else to a DVD, or another clean hard drive.
5. Remove your hard drive from your computer
After the backups, you can move your disk back to your old computer and prepare for the next part of the recovery process.
6. Completely erase your old hard drive (Format and new Partition)
Even if the virus or spyware is gone after scanning, you should still not trust your computer. The only way to make sure the drive is completely clean is to format and reinstall your operating system.
After you have backed up all your data and put the hard drive back into your computer, use a secure disk erasure tool to wipe the hard drive. There are many free and commercial disk erasure utilities. Disk wipe utilities can take several hours to completely wipe the drive because they overwrite every sector of the hard drive, even the empty ones, and they often make several passes to ensure that you don't lose anything. There are disk erasure applications that make several "passes" to be sure that every sector is completely erased. The process may be time-consuming, but it will ensure that you have eliminated the threat.
7. Reinstall your operating system from trusted media and install updates
Use the original operating system disc that you purchased or that came with your computer, do not use something that has been copied from somewhere else or is of unknown origin.
Make sure to download all updates and patches to your operating system before installing anything else.
8. New installation of anti-virus, anti-spyware or other security software before any other programs
Before installing any other applications, you should install your security software of choice. You should ensure that your anti-virus is up to date before installing any other applications. It is possible that one of them is causing the problem.
9. Scan the backups you took from your other computer
Even if you are pretty sure that everything is clean, scan the data again before re-importing it back into your system.
10. Make a full backup of your system
When your computer is like new and contains all the programs you usually use, make a full backup, so if it ever happens again you don't have to go through the whole process. Using a backup tool that creates a bootable hard drive image will keep you safe and save you a lot of time.
