Finding & deleting viruses using MS-DOS

Ok, here I will tell you how to find and delete viruses using MS DOS. Some people might come up to me and say "Hey, when you got an anti virus installed then what's the need of it?" I'll tell you what's the need of it.

1)There are people who cannot install anti-viruses on their PCs because there RAM doesn't allows them too.
2)What makes you 100% sure that your anti-virus, no matter how many awards it won or even if its up-to-date, can delete most of the viruses?

There, I answered your question. Now, lets us proceed toward the TUT.

OK, to start. Open up your CMD. To do that, goto Start-->Run. Type "CMD" (without ""). Your Command Prompt/MS-DOS will open up. And will look like this:-



You can see that the default directory selected is Document and Setting/Admin. We will need to change that cause viruses often attack your windows drive. They move on to other directories later. So, type CD\ to change the directory to C:\

Now, type the MS-DOS command attrib and press enter.



This shows that the PC is attacked by two malwares, namely AUTORUN.INF & SILENTSOFTECH.EXE. And there attributes are +s, +r & +h.

+s= attribute indicates System file.

+r= attribute indicates Read-only file.

+h= attribute indicates hidden file.

Now, you may ask that many system files have the same attribute. How can we differentiate system files and Malwares.
Easy, open your TASK MANAGER (CTRL+ALT+DEL), Goto Processes tab. If you see a process that you don't recognize and it is using abnormal CPU usage, google its name. Google is the best search engine ever developed. It'll return with results telling you whether it is a system file or Malware.

Till now, we have only discovered the Malware. Now, we need to clean it. But, first we need to remove those attributes i.e; +s, +r & +h. Or else, it won't be deleted.

To remove the attributes, type attrib -s -h -r <Malware Name>.
To confirm, type attrib again. If your malware has no more attributes, you can delete it using this command: del <Malware name>



There you have it. You have removed the virus using MS-DOS. So, now you should ask, "WHO NEEDS ANTI-VIRUS WHEN WE GOT MS-DOS". Lemme tell you who needs it. MS-DOS won't alarm you about anti-virus. You'll have to search it yourself, while an anti-virus will alarm you and makes an attempt to clean that file. So, you DO need an anti-virus program installed in your PC.