Malware I hate it with a passion! The new malware coming out these days is extremely smart. Recently, I had the opportunity or maybe misfortune of having to try to remove some malware.
The customer contacted us and said his laptop had been running very slowly the past week or two. He told us the process, explorer.exe was hogging a lot of memory, sometimes up to 4 gigabytes of it! I connected and began troubleshooting his problem and soon came to the conclusion that malware was definitely the culprit for making his laptop run slowly. I will list my steps and what I tried, bear with me if I’m kind of scattered. I went down a lot of dead-end streets before killing the malware.
Step One: Download Process Explorer and Process Monitor. These tools were immensely helpful in identifying what processes were using up memory and processor.
I ran Processor Explorer and soon saw the parent Explorer.exe process had a sub process hiding underneath it called Explorer.exe. Continue reading