'Coronavirus' malware can wreck your PC: What to do

Computer rendering of coronavirus organism, tinted orange.

(Image credit: CI Photos/Shutterstock)

UPDATED April 3 with easier method of restoring deleted Primary Boot Tape.

As if things weren't already bad plenty, a new strain of coronavirus will try to kill your reckoner.

This isn't the existent, biological coronavirus, of course. According to researchers at SonicWall, who posted a report Tuesday (March 31), information technology'south malware that borrows the coronavirus proper name, and the filename COVID-19.exe, to scare victims, to amuse its creators and possibly to go publicity.

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This digital coronavirus can arrive via a malicious web download, an email attachment or a fake awarding update. If you lot get hit by information technology, your Windows PC volition become through a few steps and pop upwards an image of an actual coronavirus before it reboots into a greyness screen displaying the words, "Your computer has been trashed."

Your Master Boot Record (MBR), the department of your hard drive that tells the figurer's hardware how to kicking up, will have been wiped and your computer volition essentially be stuck on the gray screen.

How to fix your Master Kicking Record

Don't panic just however. Chances are the data on your C drive and other Windows partitions volition remain intact. Just yous'll need to restore the MBR using special tools, and then y'all'll need to clean the machine of the malware.

Here's an explainer on how to fix the MBR on our sis site Laptop Mag. You lot'll have to use Microsoft'southward own Windows installation media to kicking the machine into a rescue configuration.

If you don't take a Windows installation disk or flash drive lying around, you'll need another PC in skilful working order to download and create the media.

After y'all fix the MBR, yous should probably utilise bootable "rescue disk" antivirus software to browse and clean the C drive before you become back to regular business. Otherwise, any time-bombs the Coronavirus malware put on your hard drive may become off.

Norton, Sophos and Trend Micro nonetheless offer updated rescue-deejay downloads. In one case over again, yous'll need a separate PC to download the software and put information technology on a flash bulldoze or optical disk.

UPDATE: Researchers at Avast had a look at the "Coronavirus" malware'southward source code and discovered that its programmer(due south) built in a neglect-safety mechanism to easily restore the original MBR: Press Ctrl + Alt + Esc during startup.

The malware creates a backup of the original MBR before it wipes information technology, and that keyboard sequence accesses the backup.

However, one time y'all've successfully got your PC back up and running, you'll need to remove the malware on your hard bulldoze because otherwise it will effort to wipe the MBR again.

You lot can do that with regular antivirus software, only yous'll also want to locate and delete the folder called "COVID-19" on your primary Windows drive (the C drive for virtually people).

Meanwhile, Bleeping Calculator found a variant of the aforementioned malware, but this time it's called "RedMist" and shows you a picture show of Squidward from "SpongeBob SquarePants" instead of a coronavirus. Similar the "Coronavirus" malware, this too can exist bypassed past hitting Ctrl + Alt + Esc during startup.

How to avoid the 'Coronavirus' malware

To foreclose getting hitting past this malware in the first place, use 1 of the best antivirus programs to notice and finish it before it infects your PC. Most of the leading antivirus signature-detection engines already will spot this malware, according to the latest snapshot from VirusTotal.

As always, don't open up e-mail attachments before your antivirus software scans them. Don't click on random links that show up in social media, in emails, in text or chat letters. Just assume the bad guys are out to get you, because they are.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has too been a dishwasher, fry melt, long-haul commuter, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting effectually in the data-security space for more 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown upwardly in random TV news spots and fifty-fifty moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA dwelling house-technology briefing. You lot tin follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.