Can Kaspersky Total Security guarantee a clean and safe PC?
I’ve been using Kaspersky Total Security for quite some time even though I’m not an Information Security professional, I heard it was considerably efficient. Yesterday, though, I was navigating through some suspicious websites and I’m afraid my PC might have been infected by something (mostly because of a weird task in my Task Manager named KMS Connection Broker as well as a weird app named only ‘Program’, with no provider informed, being initialized with my PC).
By only using Kaspersky Total Security and executing some verifications, can I make sure my PC is clean and safe from viruses? And if not, what should I do to solve it?
No you can’t. Especially not if you are running the security product from inside a potentially compromised system since in this case you (and the security product) can not really trust anything what the system reports.
Apart from that no security product is perfect. They might cover most of the normal non-risky behavior but if your are deliberately increase your risk (i.e ‘navigating through some suspicious websites’) don’t expect them to rescue you in all cases.
If you don’t want to avoid such sites use another level of separation like a virtual machine – which is not totally secure either but much safer than using the normal system.
Unfortunately the safest way is to burn or at least reinstall everything which might have been affected and restore from the latest known good backup (which you hopefully have). This not only includes the current system but also the router (which is a common target for infection) and also any other system which is connected to yours or to the router.
A less destructive option would be to boot from a definitely not infected medium (i.e. CD-ROM) and do the analysis from there. Since this only looks for known bad things this is not as safe as restoring from a known good backup. But it is definitely less destructive which is important if you don’t have a current known good backup. Kaspersky offers such an analysis medium too (Kaspersky Rescue Disk).