• Determining if your computer is infected by a virus or malware

Symptoms of malware affecting currently installed ESET products:

• Your ESET product is disabled for no reason and cannot be restarted
• A threat is discovered or the red ESET Threat Detected window keeps appearing
• You receive frequent alerts from your ESET Personal firewall about an unknown program
• You receive pop-up alerts from rogue antivirus programs claiming that you are infected with multiple viruses

Symptoms of computer malware that affect the Internet:

• You may receive the error "Internet Explorer could not display the page" when attempting to access certain websites
• Your web browser (for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome) freezes, hangs or is unresponsive
• Your web browser's default homepage is changed
• Access to www.eset.com is blocked
• You get redirected to web pages other than the one you intended to go to
• You receive numerous web-browser pop-up messages
• Strange or unexpected toolbars appear at the top of your web browser

Malware symptoms that affect system performance:

• Your computer runs slower than usual
• Your computer freezes, hangs or is unresponsive
• There are new icons on your Desktop that you do not recognize
• Your computer restarts by itself (but not a restart caused by Windows Updates)
• You see unusual error messages (for example, messages saying there are missing or corrupt files folders)
• You are unable to access the Control Panel, Task Manager, Registry Editor or Command Prompt.
  • An infiltration is blocking access to the Control Panel, Task Manager, Registry Editor, and Command Prompt - what should I do?

Symptoms of malware in email:

• You receive messages in your mailbox without a sender address or subject
• People receive spam email from your email address with a third-party email program installed (for example, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express/Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird)
  • How to recognize spam