HDD Tools & Other Malware Removal

Recently I had someone come to me with their laptop saying that they had a new anti-virus program that they didn't remember installing and that 'other things' on their laptop didn't seem to work any more. The same thing happened to a corporate desktop machine I was asked about a couple of weeks later, that was originally running McAfee. Finally, two days ago I saw another corporate machine running McAfee that was saying that it had a hard drive failure. A tool, called HDD Tools, then automatically ran to diagnose the problem and stated that if they purchased the full HDD Tools product then it could fix the problem.

Each of these was a piece of malware that had infected the machine and was trying to get the user to enter their credit card details into a website so that money can be taken from their account and maybe their card cloned. These malware programs go along with the fake anti-virus software that the APWG have reported a huge rise in recently. These are a collection of programs that purport to be useful software and will fix a problem that you are experiencing. The truth of the matter is that it is that software that is causing you the problems in the first place and paying them the money will just cause more trouble.

The later breed of scams using these supposedly useful tools do one of two things in general - either they cost you money and they may try to clone your card, or they will enlist your machine in a botnet. For a discussion of this type of malware and its proliferation, see this blog post.

Here I wanted to tell you a couple if simple steps to remove this type of software if you do get infected. Obviously, it should go without saying that you should do everything possible to try to avoid getting infected in the first place rather than try to recover from it - the damage may already be done. However, there are many similarities between them and you will need to remove them. A simple procedure can often work to get rid if them as follows (N.B. this will not always work and if you make a mistake you can make things much worse).

1. Detect that you have rogue software (malware) on your system. This isn't always hard as, in the case of HDD Tools, it will keep popping its window up and not allow you access to the C:\ drive of your computer. Other things to look for are if your AV product doesn't work or if you get strange services appearing in the Task Manager. Often the malware will stop Task Manager from running by disabling the Run command and the right-click functionality on the Taskbar. However, sometimes you can still get access to it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Look for processes with random names; HDD Tools uses a number like 20418112.exe, that will change with each infected machine.
2. Reboot your machine in Safe Mode by pressing F8 during boot (that's the function key F8, NOT press the F key then the 8 key). If your machine boots up normally then you didn't press F8 early enough - you need to reboot again. You need to go into Safe Mode as the malware will prevent you from deleting it normally by having a background service running. This will not be started in Safe Mode, so you can remove it.
3. Once in Safe Mode, you can begin to remove the malware. First, you need to find out what the malware is and where it's stored. Mostly the malware won't appear in the list of installed programs so can't simply be uninstalled, but that's worth a check. However, sometimes this can be used to reinfect the machine, so be wary. If you have rogue software on your system then it will probably have created some kind of shortcut on the desktop or in the Start menu to make it seem legitimate. Have a look at where this points to and what the name of the file is. Other places to look are in the Startup folder and in the list of services installed on the machine. In the case of HDD Tools, it installs a desktop icon and Start menu folder.
4. Navigate to the path in Windows Explorer to find all the files you are looking to remove, but don't remove them yet. HDD Tools stores its files in your temporary folder, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\username\AppData\Local Settings\temp, or C:\users\username\AppData\Local\temp. You may need to show hidden files and folders to be able to see this folder in Windows Explorer by changing the settings in Folder Options.
5. Run a file search on your machine to see if there are any other instances of those files anywhere else for you to remove.
6. Run Regedit from the Run... command to open up the registry editor (Warning: messing around with the registry can ruin your machine). Now run a search for the filename in the registry.
7. You will need to go through the registry to remove all references to the malware and any keys that it has created. In general, if the only entries in the key relate to the malware you can remove the key, otherwise just remove the values. These often appear in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT _USER in the Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion key.
8. Once you have deleted these, you can go back and delete the original files.
9. Reboot normally and check your machine.

It is still possible to get infected even if you have a properly managed device with Anti-virus software installed. The problem is that they are not 100% effective. See 'How secure is your AV Product?'