Risks of Ignoring Virus Warnings

Although most viruses can be removed from your system, they can also damage files, important files needed for your computer to run, access the Internet, even protect your PC.

I recently ran into a problem that required an OS to be re-installed.  Although I was able to get rid of the virus, and everything seemed to work except for 1 detail.  No matter what we tried, the PC could not resolve Internet names.  If you were not aware, the Internet works on IP addresses or numbers, meaning that even though you might type www.google.com in the address bar, the DNS service resolves or converts the name into a number.  In this case, the virus injected itself into key files of the network protocol stack.  This prevented looking up an Internet site to determine its IP.  A site could not be accessed unless the IP address was typed in.

I have developed fairly good skills for removing viruses from systems using various tools, without any ramifications to the rest of the system.  But in this case, I had no choice but to re-install the OS, starting from scratch and lose everything. 

The main cause of this problem was that, even though the security software warned the user of a potential problem, the user still went ahead and ran the risky program.  Of course there will be some false positives, but assuming this is not a good idea since this is seldom the case nowadays.

The moral of the story is, if your security software warns you of a potentially harmful program, research it a little before determining on your own that it wont hurt anything.  A couple extra minutes typing a file name into Google could have saved years of information that was lost by being too impatient.

For system questions and concerns contact the CCS Retail System Support Department at 800.672.4806 or email us

-Bryan