It's been long since Virtumonde attempted to hit #1 spot in the competition of Web's most disastrous trojan viruses. Virtumonde creators went to extreme lengths to make this trojan hell of mallware. They programmed virtumondo with the ability to resist to removal attempts taken by most popular antivirus software programs. McAfee, Norton, Doctor Spyware, Lavasoft Ad-Aware - all faced the new trojan challenge with weak removal algorithms.

This has become a reason why new virtumonde removers had to be developed and supported, both by software companies and volunteer coders. If a desktop antivirus was able to detect the trojan, it couldn't remove it. Self-resistance mechanism built in this malware made the process of virtumonde removal a non-trivial task. Virtumonde goes far further from just setting it to auto-start in the Registry Run key. It creates a tight integration with critical system processes - Explorer and Winlogon, thus becoming bullet-proof to attempts to impede its functioning. Even if a security program (e.g. antivirus) is able to remove some of virtumonde virus files, the trojan recreates itself after next reboot.

Trojan Virtumonde monitors the Windows memory where it keeps a special watching module. It serves as a sentinel guarding the malware memory space; once antivirus program unloads virtumonde from the memory, the sentinel puts the trojan back into memory.

Overall, any virtumonde removal tool pretending to be effective in fighting this trojan should allow to complete the removal in three steps without intermediate restarts.

1. Unload virtumonde trojan from the memory, while simultaneously blocking malware attempts to load itself back;
2. Remove the linking with Explorer and Winlogon;
3. Delete registry keys setting virtumonde to autostart with Windows booting.

Virtumonde Fix (also known as VundoFix) is a popular free virtumonde remover. It needs no installation, works even in Normal Mode. The creator of this removal tool claims it to b able to remove virtumonde of many variations. Virtumonde fix is supported and updated in case new variants of the trojan appear.

Symantec developed another free fix tool to remove virtumonde, but it covers a narrower bunch of supported variants.

Ad-aware claims to have included its Virtumonde Remover 1.0 into the software itself.

It's worth noting that it's way more difficult to remove virtumonde trojan than to protect PC's against infection. Malwarebyte's anti-malware, a-squared by EMSISOFT, SUPERAntiSpyware and other programs have background guards to prevent installation of virtumonde.

Therefore it's advised to set adequate protection before there rises the need to remove virtumonde trojan.

And there are sound resons behind that logic. Virtumonde can:

• disable Task Manager
• disable Desktop Properties
• change Wallpaper (desktop background) and screensaver
• disable Registry Editor
• hide taskbar and desktop icons
• cause endless loop of pop-ups with ads
• redirect browser searches to malicious websites

Unfortunately, common antivirus protection found on OEM computers (with pre-installed Norton, McAfee, etc) often is not capable of detecting the infection, allowing virtumonde trojan to creep into the system.