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Earlier this month, the U.S. Drone Fleet was hit by a computer malware that appeared to be logging keystrokes sent to the drones.  What’s interesting about the report is that the malware has resisted several attempts by the military to cleanse the infection.  In other words, as soon as they clean off one instance of the malware, it pops up elsewhere!

Malware comes in all sorts of sophistication flavors, but here’s a small piece of professional advice that will help you the next time your computer gets infected and help you prevent most future infections:

1. Create an administrative account on your computer that you use only for emergencies.  Don’t forget to assign a good strong password to this account.
2. If your current login account is running as an administrator, change it to a standard or non-administrator account.  This is the account that you use day-to-day.
3. The next time you suspect that your computer has been infected, completely log out of your day-to-day account, and log into your emergency administrator account.
4. From your emergency administrator account, run your virus or malware scanner and remove the infection.
5. That’s it!

The secret to the above process is in steps #1 and #2.  Step #1 sets up an account that has the capabilities and system security privileges to remove a majority of infections.  Step #2 places controls on your account, so that if it does get infected, the infecting program can not compromise the rest of the computer do things like resist removal attempts.

This approach has helped me numerous times, from helping family members remove infections from their home computers to assisting Fortune 500 companies analyze, remove and prevent malware infections on critical networks.

Good luck,

–Kevin

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