How to remove trojans from your computer?

To locate a trojan horse, remove it from your computer is a job that can be done quite easily if you use the right tools, and stay calm. Unlike viruses, the trojan horse is not there to wreck your computer, although the software is far from friendly. This type of malware opens up your computer for others to access it, either to use your machine for their own dark purposes or to access your private information. Whatever their purpose, on thing is clear - you want to get rid of the offending trojan fast!

Because of the hidden nature of the software, it can be difficult to locate the trojan horse, remove it and prevent reinfection. Luckily, if you know what you are doing, you can be quite effective at tackling the problem yourself.

The first tool that you will use is the task list. This is a list of processes that are running on your machine, and it can be accessed by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL. However, this is not as complete a list as you would expect. There are a number of processes that have been hidden from this list, which allows the trojan horse writers to hide their code from you, too.

However, there is a utility known as the System Information Utility that can help you to see even these hidden processes. This can be accessed by going to the "run" option in the start menu, and typing "msinfo32.exe"

The next tool that will help is called NetStat. For a trojan horse to be useful, it must connect to some remote computer over a network (the Internet). This connection can help you to identify a trojan horse, remove it once and for all. You can view all the current connections to other computers using a simple text line command. To use this tool, just type : "netstat -an" in the command line or the "run" option.

If there is a suspicious connection that you do not recognise, then you should check into it. There is another program that can help you find out what process is using this connection - this will be your prime suspect. The program we will use is called TCPView.

This is a free program made by a company called Sysinternals, which lists the remote machines connected to your computer, as well as what processed on your computer are communicating across the connection.

Once you have located the suspicious process, you can delete the file or rename it to prevent it from booting. But many trojan horse designers are wise to this approach, and create code that reinstalls the trojan the next time your computer reboots. To effectively remove the trojan horse, you need special software.

To see what anti trojan horse software we recommends.