Poweliks Trojan - How to remove

A Poweliks infection is listed as a Trojan virus that can infiltrate a number of other malicious applications present onto your computer. Usually it travels via exploit kits that lurk on hacked websites, so it’s really difficult not to encounter this Trojan – you never know which website can be infected.

Poweliks targets the following versions of Windows OS: Windows 2000, Windows 7, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP. The CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) associated with this Trojan is CVE-2015-0016.

You will probably notice this infection only when it’s already on your computer. There are several common symptoms shared among PCs infected with the Poweliks Trojan. First of all, your operating system and most of applications installed on it will run a little bit slower than usually – you will notice that lag for sure. Some of the applications can even be blocked or made inaccessible otherwise due to Poweliks. Moreover, if your computer is infected with Poweliks, you will be unable to download files using Internet Explorer web browser. It will display a message that ‘Your current security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded’. But the main job of the Trojan is to perform click-fraud operations, which refer to the downloading of malicious advertisements on the victim’s computer and the involuntary clicking on these ads.

In fact, it is quite simple to indicate whether your computer is infected with Poweliks because, if you take a look at your Windows Task Manager, you will see a a lot of  processes named DLLHOST.exe or dllhst3g.exe running. If you use 32 or 86 bit Windows, the process is named dllhost.exe *32. If you use 64 bit Windows the process comes under the name of dllhst3g.exe *32.

A Poweliks installer is deleted immediately after the malicious program has been installed on your computer’s system. This  particular Trojan is usually stored on Windows Registry – not on the hard drive. It hijacks the Registry’s CLSID entries. In this way, it is much more difficult for antivirus programs to detect this Trojan Horse. If that would not be enough, the malicious Trojan can be found hiding under different names. Here are all known names of Poweliks, detected by different antivirus programs: Win32:Poweliks-A [Trj], Win32/Poweliks.A, Win32/Poweliks.B, Trojan:Win32/Powessere.A, Trojan.Poweliks, Trojan.Win32.Powerliks.a, Trojan.Poweliks.A, TROJ_POWELIKS.A, Trojan.Poweliks.A.

As far as we know, it is far more easier to get rid of this malicious application by using Spyhunter, Malwarebytes or Hitman anti-malware program. Interestingly enough, the creators of Poweliks Trojan had even posted a blog post about this infection and it’s removal. Do not forget that, even if you have this Trojan infection completely removed from your computer, you should scan it additionally afterwards. Poweliks can infiltrate various infections to your computer’s system (it is associated with CryptoWall ransomware), therefore, you need to ensure that they all are eliminated and the system is completely safe and secured. All this is accomplished by the automatic malware removal software lined out previously.

Automatic Malware removal tools