Brendan Smith

Brendan Smith has spent over 15 years knee-deep in cybersecurity, chasing down malware from the gritty reverse-engineering of old-school trojans all the way to wrangling full-blown incident responses for small-to-medium businesses that couldn’t afford a full-blown breach. Over at Gridinsoft, he’s the guy piecing together those double-checked guides on nasty stuff like AsyncRAT, a remote access tool used in malware campaigns—helping readers make sense of the threat and work through cleanup without the extra headache.
Cybersecurity Analyst
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686 Articles

Aviator Predictor Malware

Aviator Predictor-style apps can be used as fake crypto and crash-game tools.…

Brendan Smith

Heur.BZC.PZQ.Boxter: Bitdefender Alert or False Positive?

Heur.BZC.PZQ.Boxter is a Bitdefender heuristic label, so the file source, path, signature,…

Brendan Smith

Mobility-search.com Removal

Remove Mobility-search.com from Chrome or Edge by cleaning Site Search, extensions, policies,…

Brendan Smith

TotalAV Pop-Up Removal: Stop Alerts After Uninstall

TotalAV pop-ups can come from the app, Windows notifications, browser permissions, fake…

Brendan Smith

Itchupd.pages.dev Virus: Automatic Updater_v3.3.zip Download Cleanup

If itchupd.pages.dev started downloading Updater_v3.3.zip, check whether the file completed or ran,…

Brendan Smith

Homesearchtab.com Redirect: Remove Chrome Startup Hijack

Homesearchtab.com still opens when Chrome starts? Remove the startup page, search shortcut,…

Brendan Smith

Rainbow Blocker Removal: Browser Adware Cleanup

Remove Rainbow Blocker, stop api.rainbowblocker.com security alerts, clean browser permissions, check sync,…

Brendan Smith

Friends Ransomware: .friends124 File Recovery Guide

Friends ransomware appends the .friends124 extension and drops RANSOM_NOTE.html. Learn how to…

Brendan Smith

Hommy Ransomware: .hommy File Recovery Guide

Hommy ransomware adds the .hommy extension and leaves +README-WARNING+.txt. Isolate the PC,…

Brendan Smith

RealtekHD taskhostw.exe AutoIt Error Cleanup

Seeing an AutoIt error from RealtekHD taskhostw.exe? Line 21219 or another line…

Brendan Smith

ML/Augur Alert: False Positive or Malware?

ESET ML/Augur alert on an Edge update, installer, or unknown EXE? Learn…

Brendan Smith

Win32:Malware-gen / Other:Malware-gen: False Positive or Malware?

Seeing Win32:Malware-gen or Other:Malware-gen on cmd.exe or another file? Learn when it…

Brendan Smith

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