Saturday, November 9, 2019

windows - How do I know if I managed to completely remove an undetected trojan?

I catched a trojan that uses explorer.exe to reproduce itself in case of deletion of its autostart entry or main exe file in Programs/x.



It had already tried to contact a suspicious server over explorer.exe, blocked that via my firewall.




I:




  • Removed the autostart entries from the registry

  • Looked through my services if there was anything suspicious

  • Deleted the trojan from Programs/

  • Went through System Volume Information to find a 2 month old explorer.exe and replaced the possibly infected one.



There are no suspicious processes running now anymore (no duplicate explorer.exe) and nothing wants to connect this trojan owners sever either.




I checked my system with several anti-malware programs too.



What the trojan did:




  • Started a second explorer.exe

  • Always when I deleted the main trojan exe file it was reproduced (by the second explorer.exe)

  • Always when I deleted the autostart entry it was reproduced by the explorer.exe too.




When I terminated the suspicious explorer.exe, which used only half as much memory as the less suspicious one from Windows, a strange thing that I know from the computers in my Informatics class happened:



A window popped up in the top left of my explorer-less desktop, titled "Personal settings for ... are ..." that obviously copied some files.
Then both explorer.exes started again and the trojan was everywhere again.




  • What did the trojan actually do to get explorer to rescue it?

  • Is my PC clean of this newish trojan now?

  • What are the other locations I should check for the trojan?


  • The trjoan doesn't seem very high-level, could it have changed other system files or is the autostart entry vital for it?

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