The Vundo Trojan (aka Virtumonde or Virtumondo) as been the focus of my detestation for a little while now. Whenever I am researching symptoms there is always someone out there who says, ‘Could be Vundo. Run Vundo removal programs.’ In the worst cases I have found that this trojan or at least one of the strains of this trojan will cause a PC to run extremely slow. I am talking get coffee and drink it all during startup. Its purpose is also to download other baddies to spatter ads in your face and some of them can be quite a nuisance to remove. Norton has made a removal tool/scanner for vundo and there is at least one private source for another scanner/cleaner. Depending on what variation of the trojan and how long it has been burrowing in your system feeding off your bandwidth these scanners may not completely remove it all.

Anyway, the real reason I wanted to write this post is while I have been researching this problem and its removal I found a cause. The good folks over at atribune.org say on their instructions that one of the main ways vundo can get into your machine is through exploits in older versions of java and java runtime environment. This makes sense to me because when you are redirected to the java web site to download a updated version it will download and install the latest version, but it will not remove the past version during the installation. So if you go into your Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs you should see all the different versions of this program that you have had on your machine. You should remove these leaving only the latest versions.

The latest as of this post is ‘Java 6 Update 5′ and ‘Java SE Runtime Environment 6 Update 1′. When in doubt just remove them all and go to Java.com to download the latest.

Well thats all for now. Keep safe. If you need protection check out rsltech.com/ads.php

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