ItsGeekToMe.co
The official home of It's Geek to Me on the web!
Issue #254: June 3, 2012
Q: I just found that my laptop has 18 Rootkits. Tried Google for help, but not sure which advice to follow? I understand that these are serious kits. Any help you can suggest will be appreciated.
– Jerry B.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
A: You sound like you have almost everything you need to get a fix underway, Jerry. The actual procedure will likely be specific to your computer, and without my hands on it, I wouldn’t be able to even begin to spell out steps. So, please take this as an attempt to encourage you, and point you in the right direction rather than provide a complete end-to-end fix. Let’s begin by educating my other readers, many of whom will never have heard the term “rootkit” before, or if they have, don’t know what it means.
A rootkit is an especially nasty type of malware that is designed to hide its existence from the normal methods that malware scanners use. In so doing, it evades detection by most scanners – both freeware paid commercial versions. Most rootkits install by tricking the user into unwittingly providing administrator-level access to the computer, usually by running a user account that (unnecessarily) has administrator privileges. Once hidden, a rootkit is able to both evade scanners, and access privileged components of the operating system that even you, the user, aren’t allowed to tinker with. It’s an excellent arrangement for the rootkit, because the level of control that it is able to gain in a system is the very thing that allows it to circumvent software that might otherwise detect it. With that level of access to a system, a rootkit can do such nasty things as redirecting your internet traffic to sites of its own choosing, bombarding you with pop-up ads, gathering passwords and other personal information and sending them back to the malware perpetrator, or just about anything else you can think of.
In my experience, having 18 rootkits on a single machine is a rather high number. All of them running simultaneously must be having a catastrophic effect on your machine’s performance. I’m curious how you discovered the rootkits without also discovering a way to remove them, since most scanning software capable of detecting rootkits is also able to remove them (though you may have to run your system in Safe Mode to do so). There are a number of rootkit scanners for Windows, which, as you said are available via Google search. Stick to the ones from well-known sources to avoid introducing new problems that are disguised as cures. And remember that for a rootkit to hide itself it must be running, so you might want to boot from a rescue CD or some other alternate trustworthy medium to maximize a scanner’s chances of locating and removing the problems. Good luck!
Q: I use pink or yellow foolscap pads for ‘scratch pads’. I frequently have to scan and print a sheet. Is there any way to have the print pages come out on white paper? The yellow or pink seems to use a lot of ink. I would rather the printed sheet be on white anyway! Many thank for your column, and your information. I count on it year round!
– Ginger T.
Totonto, Ontario Canada
A: Happy to be of service, Ginger – thanks for being a fan. The simplest thing you can do is to scan in black and white, rather than color. If the background shows up as light gray, adjust your scanner software’s brightness to mask it out. If using B&W is not practical, you can use photo editing software on the scanned image to select the background color and assign it as “transparent”, which is only available in certain file formats, such as GIF, TIFF, and PNG. The method of assigning the transparency varies depending on the software, so consult your manual.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.