[conquer]

About a month ago, I had a trojan in one of my files. My AVG instantly picked it up and the trojan was transferred to the virus vault. Afterwards, I emptied the vault. But here's the problem. After emptying the vault, I proceeded to manually delete the file itself. I cannot remember if I restarted my PC anytime soon afterwards but I definitely remember doing further scans with AVG and Malwarebytes. Those scans showed that my computer was clean, so I naturally assumed I was fine.

But the whole incident has been plaguing the back of mind since then. Did I deal with the "trojan horse backdoor" in the wrong manner? What if the reason that my scans didn't pick up anything was because I manually deleted the infected file after emptying the vault but the trojan is actually still there? Like, the trojan is still in my hard-drive somewhere because I manually deleted the infected file? (apparently when you permanently delete something from the recycle bin, it doesn't mean that it's actually deleted properly; it could still be lurking about in your hard-drive but harder to spot or retrieve?)

I remember going online and reading the advices of some computing websites about deleting trojans and the way that I did it was far different from the way that they did it. And that's why I'm worried about whether I have dealt with the trojan properly and whether it may still be lurking about in my computer for someone to retrieve sensitive info from me (despite my AVG and Malwarebytes scans coming with clean results) or even worse, hack my computer.

Can anyone help?

[Iqbal007]

(Original post by conquer)
About a month ago, I had a trojan in one of my files. My AVG instantly picked it up and the trojan was transferred to the virus vault. Afterwards, I emptied the vault. But here's the problem. After emptying the vault, I proceeded to manually delete the file itself. I cannot remember if I restarted my PC anytime soon afterwards but I definitely remember doing further scans with AVG and Malwarebytes. Those scans showed that my computer was clean, so I naturally assumed I was fine.

But the whole incident has been plaguing the back of mind since then. Did I deal with the "trojan horse backdoor" in the wrong manner? What if the reason that my scans didn't pick up anything was because I manually deleted the infected file after emptying the vault but the trojan is actually still there? Like, the trojan is still in my hard-drive somewhere because I manually deleted the infected file? (apparently when you permanently delete something from the recycle bin, it doesn't mean that it's actually deleted properly; it could still be lurking about in your hard-drive but harder to spot or retrieve?)

I remember going online and reading the advices of some computing websites about deleting trojans and the way that I did it was far different from the way that they did it. And that's why I'm worried about whether I have dealt with the trojan properly and whether it may still be lurking about in my computer for someone to retrieve sensitive info from me (despite my AVG and Malwarebytes scans coming with clean results) or even worse, hack my computer.

Can anyone help?

Well from what I remember, you get these trojan's etc when you run a exe file, so deleting one shouldn't be a problem its when you run it.
And you are right, nothing is hard deleted on a hard drive, the place where your stored it is just seen as space available on store on. So whenever you save anything, etc it should write over it.

[Mad Vlad]

(Original post by conquer)
About a month ago, I had a trojan in one of my files. My AVG instantly picked it up and the trojan was transferred to the virus vault. Afterwards, I emptied the vault. But here's the problem. After emptying the vault, I proceeded to manually delete the file itself. I cannot remember if I restarted my PC anytime soon afterwards but I definitely remember doing further scans with AVG and Malwarebytes. Those scans showed that my computer was clean, so I naturally assumed I was fine.

But the whole incident has been plaguing the back of mind since then. Did I deal with the "trojan horse backdoor" in the wrong manner? What if the reason that my scans didn't pick up anything was because I manually deleted the infected file after emptying the vault but the trojan is actually still there? Like, the trojan is still in my hard-drive somewhere because I manually deleted the infected file? (apparently when you permanently delete something from the recycle bin, it doesn't mean that it's actually deleted properly; it could still be lurking about in your hard-drive but harder to spot or retrieve?)

I remember going online and reading the advices of some computing websites about deleting trojans and the way that I did it was far different from the way that they did it. And that's why I'm worried about whether I have dealt with the trojan properly and whether it may still be lurking about in my computer for someone to retrieve sensitive info from me (despite my AVG and Malwarebytes scans coming with clean results) or even worse, hack my computer.

Can anyone help?

In all probability, it's been removed.