Am I Infected?

Picture this: you turn on your computer and you wait. And wait. And wait. Once you finally load into the desktop your internet is sluggish, programs are taking a long time to load and you mouse clicks aren’t registering.

You might have a failing or hard drive or…. You might be infected.

Sometimes a malware infection is obvious. Other times it’s a silent killer.

Let’s take a look at the signs: 

You have ransomware

This one is the most blatant infection. With this one they want you to know that you are infected and they will take your data, lock it with a key no one in the world can replicate, and demand you pay them in order to get your money back. There are deadlines and if you don’t pay them in time they will destroy the key or raise the price.

Browser redirects

You click on a link from Facebook to a cooking video on YouTube only instead of it going to YouTube you are taken to a completely different page and this keeps happening. 

Different home page

When you open your web browser instead of the page opening to www.google.com you are taken to trovi.com or yahoo.com and there are new toolbars that you have never seen before. 

Pop-ups galore

The kind you can’t escape. If you close one another opens. Sometimes you aren’t even connected to the wifi and you still have pop-ups. These are usually adware or spyware related. 

Less obvious signs:

Slow computer

A lot of times this is because of viruses on your machine. This happens because the viruses are essentially programs running (that you have no idea about) and they use up your computer resources.

New and unfamiliar icons on your desktop

A lot of times you can download a legitimate program that includes what we call PUPS (Potentially Unwanted Programs). These are a lot more common than a lot of people realize and can be installed frequently from download.com or other download websites. (Which we highly recommend avoiding.)

Constant Crashing of Programs or Blue Screens

If it is not due to a hardware or driver incompatibility it can likely be due to viruses. This is because a lot of viruses (think rootkits) latch into the Windows Kernal and cause instability on your system.

Web browser freezing and general unresponsiveness

Slow internet could be just that — Check your wifi signals or your download speeds with you Internet Service Provider to be sure. But if everything checks out okay then this could be a sign of infection.

Bounced E-mails

We are all guilty of sending e-mails to a miss-typed address. But if you notice several bounces and e-mails returned to your inbox undelivered there is definitely something else going on here.

A lot of times it is because your infected computer will send out e-mails using the addresses it found in your computer.

If you are noticing a lot of these signs call us today and we’ll help you figure out if it’s Malware related or not.