Viruses are a dangerous species, not just for humans but for computers also. From slowing down your system to crashing the operating system or gathering your private and confidential data surreptitiously, these viruses can wreak havoc in your life. One such virus in this gamut of computer viruses is idp.alexa.51. which causes major system performance issues.
What is IDP Alex 51 and How does it Infect Your System
IDP Alexa is believed to behave like the famous trojan horse virus. This virus is a detection that is primarily associated with the installation of certain online flash games such as “Plant vs Zombies”, “SeaMonkey”, and few others. There are .tmp and .exe files contained in windows folders like {536a4c555a7f2e45c227c27aaa353c302f43202159891754233440df1d77627d}appdata, {536a4c555a7f2e45c227c27aaa353c302f43202159891754233440df1d77627d}temp, etc. and the virus is supposed to have originated from there.
Many antivirus software such Avira, AVG, and Avast can detect IDP Alexa.
IDP Alexa was first detected in 2016 and unlike regular viruses, this one could be an actual infection or seems to have false positives too. This article will look into how to avoid infiltration of this virus and in case it does get into your system, how to remove this virus.
What is a False Positive?
As mentioned, IDP.Alexa.51 behaves very similarly to the dreadful Trojan virus. In some software, the detected IDP Alexa virus could be harmless while in other cases it could have the same ramifications as FileRepMalware, TrojanWIn32 (Tiggre!rfn). This virus is so cleverly designed that there is no way one can detect its presence normally.
A false positive means that a file was flagged as a virus even though it was not one. The IDP Alexa detection essentially means that there is no identification of infection as such and it is not associated with any malware family. But it behaved in a suspicious manner for the AV application to flag it as malicious.
It is also possible that one detects a legitimate application as infected by the idp.alexa.51 virus due to an outdated or expired anti-virus suite DB running on the system. But beware that cybercriminals may take advantage of users neglecting the threat due to the false-positive notion and not verify if it is legitimate or not. In such cases, many PUPs (potentially unwanted programs) or malware can be presented as idp.alexa.51 and cause grave issues to users’ devices.
What idp.alexa.51 can do to your System
The Alexa virus is not easy to detect as it acts like spyware. It is designed in such a way that users might not feel that something aggressive is happening to their system. But people might experience many glitches while working on their systems. Amongst the many adverse effects of this virus, some of the most dangerous ones are:
- It can download and install other hosts of malware onto your system.
- It has the capability to record your keystrokes and all the sites that you visit on your PC.
- Hackers can gain information about your system (like your username and password, browsing history, etc.) through this virus.
- Your computer can be used to perform fraud if this virus infects it.
- It can give remote access to your computer to vicious hackers.
- With this virus, the web page content could get modified (hijack browsers) and at times random web page text could act like hyperlinks.
- Intrusive advertisement banners could start getting injected into the websites you visit.
- There could be an appearance of browser popups that might recommend other software or fake updates.
- There could be a significant slow down in the performance of your PC.
- You might lose essential files which include crucial Windows files too.
- Some bogus and unwanted software could get installed without you ever authorizing it.
- Your system might experience the blue screen death.
- Even without doing any processor-intensive activity on your system, your RAM could be getting excessively used up.
- You could be redirected to suspicious sites that have commercial content.
- Your system’s resources could be used to run additional processes.
How to Remove IDP Alexa 51 from your System
So, despite taking precautions, what do you do if this virus still infects your device? As long as you have good anti-virus software installed on your machine, it is pretty simple to remove the Alexa virus. One must take care and avoid downloading content from any random website on the internet. Here are some of the ways to avoid and remove this virus:
- Update your anti-virus suite – In case it is a false positive, you must check if there is an update available for your anti-virus software. By updating your anti-virus suite database and rerunning the scanner, you must not see the warning for the Alexa virus. If you still do get the warning then you need to take additional steps to get rid of it.
- Manually removing the malicious software – IDP Alexa may have gotten installed by some specific software and is contained in it. You can run a scanner to know which software you do not use or which ones got installed without your knowledge and remove them manually.
- Sometimes by uninstalling the infected software you should be able to get rid of the Alexa virus.
- Despite all the above methods, if you still get the virus threat after scanning your system then you would need to go for system restore. This action will restore your system to the version just before it got infected with the IDP Alexa 51 virus. This would need you to remember the time when you feel your system did not have the virus. One thing to note here is that by system restore all the files you created after your system acquired the virus will also be deleted.
Conclusion: idp.alexa.51 Removal
Getting online is inevitable for any of us but we need to take precautions so that malicious viruses do not enter our PC. You must download games and other software from their official or safe websites. Peer-to-peer networks like torrent are another way of getting this virus. As a precautionary measure, you should always have a good anti-virus on your system and always keep the DB of the suite up-to-date.