If, despite all the security measures you take, your computer gets infected by a virus or worm, it is necessary to disinfect your system somehow. While for some viruses the only 100% realiable method of disinfection is restoring your system from backups, for many common infections this is not really necessary and the virus/worm can be removed quite easily.

Removing the infection

The worms often schedule themselves to be run automatically when you start your operating system; some of them even register themselves to be run when any other application is started. Removing such a worm is not as simple as deleting it - when you just delete the worm file, your operating system might not be able to start your applications (such as Explorer) any more.

So, in order to properly remove the worm from your computer, it is often necessary to make additional fixes in your system registry, delete the links from your Startup Folder etc. Here the avast! Virus Cleaner comes - it will find and remove selected worms from your computer, as well as fix the registry and startup items to make sure your system will work correctly after the disinfection.

Many worms - when activated - create additional working files on your hard disk. Even though these files alone are harmless, they are useless and they should not be there. When avast! Virus Cleaner detects and removes a known worm from your computer, its working/temporary files are removed as well. The same applies for worm-specific registry entries etc.

List of known worms
avast! Virus Cleaner is currently (in version 1.0.204) able to identify and remove the following worm families:

  • Win32:Badtrans [Wrm]
  • Win32:Beagle [Wrm] (aka Bagle), variants A-L, U, W-Z, AA-AH
  • Win32:Blaster [Wrm] (aka Lovsan), variants A-I
  • Win32:BugBear [Wrm], including B-H variants
  • Win32:Ganda [Wrm]
  • Win32:Klez [Wrm], all variants (including variants of Win32:Elkern)
  • Win32:MiMail [Wrm], variants A, C, E, I-N, Q, S-V
  • Win32:Mydoom [Wrm] (variants A, B, D, F-N - including the trojan horse)
  • Win32:Nachi [Wrm] (aka Welchia, variants A-K)
  • Win32:NetSky [Wrm] (aka Moodown, variants A-Z, AA-AB)
  • Win32:Nimda [Wrm]
  • Win32:Opas [Wrm] (aka Opasoft, Opaserv)
  • Win32:Parite (aka Pinfi), variants A-C
  • Win32:Sasser [Wrm] (variants A-F)
  • Win32:Scold [Wrm]
  • Win32:Sircam [Wrm]
  • Win32:Sober [Wrm], variants A-G
  • Win32:Sobig [Wrm], including variants B-F
  • Win32:Swen [Wrm], including UPX-packed variants
  • Win32:Yaha [Wrm] (aka Lentin), all variants
  • Win32:Zafi [Wrm] (variants A-B)