What is Gameover Zeus and How to Get Rid of It? (Trojan Removal Guide)

Gameover Zeus is a malicious threat to computer. If your computer is unluckily gets infected with it, please get rid of it as soon as possible. The threat is able to get your online banking information and steal your money. What is it and how can you remove it? Read this post and you can learn several effective steps to deal with it.

What is Gameover Zeus?

GameOver Zeus (GOZ) is a variant of Trojan.Zbot, often known as ‘Zeus’, and uses a peer-to-peer network and domain generation algorithm (DGA) for command and control. The P2P command-and-control system (PDF) keeps GOZ running. Usually, the threat is typically distributed through an email which poses as an invoice. Once you click on the link or attachment in the vicious email, you computer will be infected. It is quite difficult for you to notice the invasion of this threat. Regular antivirus programs may fail to pick up it because such threats change constantly in order to evade detection and auto removal.

Why do you have to remove Gameover Zeus promptly?

As a matter of fact, this Trojan is aggressive and dangerous. According to Brian Krebs, GOZ “has since October 2011 been controlled and maintained by a core group of hackers from Russia and Ukraine. Those individuals are believed to have used the botnet in high-dollar corporate account takeovers that frequently were punctuated by massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks intended to distract victims from immediately noticing the thefts. According to the Justice Department, Gameover has been implicated in the theft of more than $100 million in account takeovers.”  This variant of Trojan.Zbot uses a tiered, decentralized system of intermediary proxies and strong encryption to hide the location of servers that the botnet masters use to control the crime machine. Hackers also use it to distribute CryptoLocker to separate you from your hard-earned bitcoins. Thousands of innocent computer users become the victims of this threat. Once their PCs get infected by GOZ, the Trojan can intercept their online session using a technique commonly known as man-in-the-browser (MITB) when they visit their backing websites. It can bypass two factor authentication and display fraudulent banking security messages to the users to obtain information for transaction authorization. Once users type their confidential information, the attackers will get it and modify the users’ banking transactions and steal their money.

For the sake of your computer security and your online banking information security, please remove GameOver Zeus from the computer without delay. If you are an advanced computer user, follow the steps below to clear the Trojan manually. If not, you can ask computer experts for help or use professional removal tool instead.

How to get rid of GameOver Zeus from your PC effectively?

Method1: Automatically remove the Trojan by using a professional removal tool.

It is the best way to eradicate Gameover Zeus from the PC for a professional removal tool is able to automatically scan the entire computer system, detect and delete all the traces of GOZ effectively. It is incorporated with latest and sophisticated malware detection technology that easily spots new evolving online threats and removes them from PC.

Just with several steps below and you will be able to erase the threat once for all.

Download and install a reliable removal on PC.

Run it to scan your entire system and delete all the infected files found associated with the Trojan.

Restart your computer.

Method2. Restore your computer to previous time.

To open System Restore, click the Start button. In the search box, type System Restore, and then, in the list of results, click System Restore.

 

If you’re prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

Follow the steps in the wizard to choose a restore point and restore your computer. Try using restore points created just before the date and time you started noticing problems.

 

Method3. Delete the files and registry entries of the Trojan manually.

Step1: Terminate the process associated with the Trojan.

Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC keys together to open Windows Task Manager. Click Processes tab and then select the processes associated with the Trojan and click End Process to terminate them.

Note: The process name of the malware may be random characters.

 

Step3. Show the hidden files.

Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button, clickingControl Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.

 

Click the View tab, and then you should select “Show hidden files and folders” in the list. If you are trying to get into the Windows directories, you might want to also remove the checkbox from “Hide protected operating system files” as well.

 

Step4: Delete malicious files of the Trojan.

Search for the following malicious files and have them deleted. Please note that the GOZ keeps changing and its files may alter all every once in a while. So to manually delete them, you have to know the Trojan very well or you may delete wrong files and damage the computer.

Step5. Delete the registry entries created by the infection.

To open Windows registry, click Start, go to Run, type regedit in the box and click OK.

In the Windows Registry, locate to the registry entries created by the Trojan and delete them.

Suggestion:

Gameover Zeus is a malicious computer threat that should be deleted from PC timely. Otherwise your online banking information may be stolen by attackers and you will suffer from huge losses. To get rid of the threat from your PC, you can follow the methods mentioned above to fix the problem. Honestly speaking, it’s risky to delete the components of the GOZ manually. Therefore, we recommend you to use a professional removal tool to get rid of Gameover Zeus.