Manual Removal Guide for Fake.PCTools

The following instructions have been created to help you to get rid of "Fake.PCTools" manually.
Use this guide at your own risk; software should usually be better suited to remove malware, since it is able to look deeper.

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Threat Details:

Categories:

• trojan

Description:

This trojan horse pretends to be a useful PC tool. It installs itself as browser helper object (BHO) to get started with the Internet Explorer. It drops its malicious files to various locations like the Windows profile directories and the system directory.

Removal Instructions:

Files:

Please use Windows Explorer or another file manager of your choice to locate and delete these files.

• The file at "<$COMMONAPPDATA>\pctools.dll".
• The file at "<$SYSDIR>\<$REGMATCH1>.dll".
• The file at "<$COMMONAPPDATA>\..\Applicationpctools.dll".

Make sure you set your file manager to display hidden and system files. If Fake.PCTools uses rootkit technologies, use our RootAlyzer or our Total Commander anti-rootkit plugins.
You will have to use a global search for files without a name specified. Be extra careful, because just the name might not be enough to identify files!

Registry:

You can use regedit.exe (included in Windows) to locate and delete these registry entries.

• Delete the registry key "{385AB8C6-FB22-4D17-8834-064E2BA0A6F0}" at "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\".
• Delete the registry key "{385AB8C6-FB22-4D17-8834-064E2BA0A6F0}" at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\".
• Delete the registry value "{385AB8C6-FB22-4D17-8834-064E2BA0A6F0}" at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellExecuteHooks\".
• Remove "<regexpr><$SYSDIR>\\(\S{4,8})\.dll" from registry value "" at "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{385AB8C6-FB22-4D17-8834-064E2BA0A6F0}\InprocServer32\".

If Fake.PCTools uses rootkit technologies, use our RegAlyzer, RootAlyzer or our Total Commander anti-rootkit plugins.

Final Words:

If neither Spybot-S&D nor self help did resolve the issue or you would prefer one on one help,

1. Please read these instructions before requesting assistance,
2. Then start your own thread in the Malware Removal Forum where a volunteer analyst will advise you as soon as available.

There are more files or system entries belonging to this product that <$SPYBOTSD> can remove, but that cannot be easily described in text. Please use <$SPYBOTSD> to make sure <$PRODUCTNAME> gets completely removed.