I just spent an unhappy weekend trying to get a friend's PC clear of viruses.

Wasting far too many hours I kept wishing that government Internet Minister Sion Simon and his PA had been there.

(See last week's blog about the Minister's failure to recognise how viruses, spyware and Trojan malware undermine his plans for a Digital Britain.)

Somehow one virus had got in, blocked Panda Anti-Virus updating and stopped Panda protecting.

This let more in, one of which re-directed every web search to scam sales sites and offers to sell phoney cures for the re-direction problem.

Trusted tricks like one-off scanning with Malwarebytes and Windows Defender were blocked.

When I reinstalled Panda I found over 100 virus, spyware and Trojan infections. But web searches were still getting redirected.

So I tried installing different protection, from Trend. This found more infections. But safe sites like Amazon were being blocked as dangerous. More scans to try and find out if this was a problem with Trend or another virus never finished.

Downloading a newer version of Trend may have fixed the problem. But I don't yet know because the latest viruses are capable of mutating, and lying low, just like flu viruses, to evade detection and cure.

Whereas early viruses tried to crash PCs for fun, the new ones try to sell something, hold the user to ransom, steal stored identity, bank and credit card data, and record keystrokes to collect passwords for sending off to a hacker. 

If only the skill that goes into writing viruses could be channeled into making Windows programs easier to use.

Most PCs are sold with only a short trial subscription for virus protection.

The software has to be activated and updated before it can work, and then kept working by subscription payments.

Network connections are always flakey and the easiest way to stop a Firewall interfering with a network is to turn it off. But that opens the gates to bad stuff. We know all this, but Joe Public doesn’t. 

People are used to going to an internet cafe where virus protection is all taken care of, often by automatically wiping the entire operating system clean after each customer's session and reinstalling it from a mirror image backup before the next session.

Company executives and government ministers are molly-coddled by IT departments.

I know one family that can't be bothered with protection. They visit dodgy sites and then protest ignorance when they take their laptop back claiming free service under guarantee.

Going to the History option in the web browser will usually show what sites the user has visited. But more people are wise to this, especially after an episode of The Office, where David Brent pseudo-casually asks how to delete the history trail from his PC.

The trick used to be buried: Right click on the Internet Explorer icon - or click on Tools while using Internet Explorer - to get Internet Options; General tab; under History click on Delete. Now it’s been made much easier: Click on Safety in the upper bar and Clear History. Or use Safety, InPrivate Browsing.  Tip: InPrivate also seems to fool some viruses that redirect web searches.

What the naughty surfer may well not know is that Autocomplete can be an equally effective telltale.

Try entering a few choice phrases in the search page or address line. You will be surprised what comes up as the

Autocomplete function of Internet Explorer helpfully tries to finish half-entered words. It may well reveal passwords as well.

The way to remove this revealing telltale is to go to Internet Options again, select the Content tab, Click on

Autocomplete and then Delete Autocomplete History.

That's one trick that David Brent didn't know.
 
Barry Fox