How to remove spyware using HijackThis

google-site-verification=ConJMH783GAFpknpANwlOsajeF2uHunuHjbBhFZBAcw Are you getting unusual system slowdown?  Have you tried scanning your computer with an antivirus and cleaned up your hard disk but still no effect?  Is your browser too crowded with silly add-ons that your favorite niece mercilessly installed on your home computer?

Stop pulling you hair. Your computer could be infested by malware, adware or just plain annoying but hard to remove software that your antivirus or personal firewall software failed to detect.  Nowadays it is easy to be infected with these sort of software because they come in with legitimate software installers like a hardware device driver or a media player.

Canon printers for example come in with a “bonus” software like Easy-WebPrint that supposedly lets you print web pages using your browser.  I can do that with just a plain print button on the browser, thank you very much Canon.  If you think Canon is bad for trying to give you this stuff, HP is even worse – the HP utility software run even when you are not printing, scanning or browsing anything!

Apple also loves to bundle their Itunes software with modules you don’t need like the Apple mobile device service, can’t they wait until I am able to buy an iPhone before they enable this software in my computer?  These unuseful crapware hogs memory and CPU utilization thereby slowing the overall system performance.

Usually, if we want to kill a process we go to the Windows Task Manager.  But we all know that the Task Manager just lets you stop processes and not remove them – they will still comeback and run once you reboot or open a program that calls the process.  Uninstalling the software using Add/Remove Programs on the control panel could also be a non-option since most of the time there is no way you can uninstall a component without uninstalling the whole thing – you don’t want to have a printer without a driver right?

An answer from the Trend Micro Group came when they gave the freeware called HijackThis.  Download.com gave it a perfect 5 star rating and is tested spyware free.  This tool lets you scan the registry and hard drive and lists down everything so you can pick and “fix” what you think is bad.
Scanning your computer with HijackThis is simple, open it, click “Do a system scan and save a logfile” and wait until it finishes scanning:

A sample scan result is shown below:

At first this could look too complicated but it’s not.  The coded groups like R1, R0, O2, O3 at the beginning of each entry is just the group or type of entry.  To see the description of each group click the Info… button on the lower right corner:

This should give an output with the list of groups and the corresponding description:
R – Registry, StartPage/SearchPage changes
R0 – Changed registry value
R1 – Created registry value
R2 – Created registry key
R3 – Created extra registry value where only one should be
F – IniFiles, autoloading entries
F0 – Changed inifile value
F1 – Created inifile value
F2 – Changed inifile value, mapped to Registry
F3 – Created inifile value, mapped to Registry
N – Netscape/Mozilla StartPage/SearchPage changes
N1 – Change in prefs.js of Netscape 4.x
N2 – Change in prefs.js of Netscape 6
N3 – Change in prefs.js of Netscape 7
N4 – Change in prefs.js of Mozilla
[... so on...]

Be warned: this tool lets you remove everything including the good software.  It doesn’t identify which is good or bad, rather it let’s you find and pinpoint what you think is the offending software and with that information, you can remove it.  Do not remove the item if you are not sure.

After identifying the culprit, check the box beside them and click Fix checked:

It will prompt with a warning, so again please be careful, after hitting Yes there is no turning back:

The next  part is the System Settings Change window, this will restart your computer (needed to remove the service and maybe the registry entry).  Click Yes to restart the computer.

After that, you are done.  The annoying software that you “fixed” should be gone.  The HijackThis tool is recommended for users that want to take control of the processes on their computer.  It can also be an effective analysis tool to determine serious security breaches like a keylogger.