Cheat Engine

[kot1990]

I want to know all the ways a virus program can be running into a windows operating system. So far I know that it can run as an executable, exe,com,pif,bat and all other kind of scripts,, but are there hidden processes or something like that? because there is nothing running in task manager that system processes and my personal programs,, but the virus is still active... Also I don't understand how the virus is started at windows startup. I know it can be configured with msconfig from the registry and services too...

[AhMunRa]

A common method these days seems to be hooking into Winlogon. The virus rootkit spyware what have you hook into this process and runs itself directly from memory, as soon as it's running it may delete itself from the harddrive altogether. Then when winlogon detects a sig int to shut down the malware running in memory rewrites itself to the harddisk and possibly modifies the registry to rerun itself at startup.

If you have issues with a piece of malware you can try a Linux live cd, this will boot up your computer in another OS leaving your Windows install completely intact. From here you can run a scan against your harddrive to attempt to clean the program from your system.

Google: linux live cd to remove malware