How to tell if friend's PC is using a VPN

[Cedric62]

Well, a friend of mine who is in his eighties asked me to take a look at his PC because he was getting all sorts of pop up notifications telling him it was infected with viruses.  To make a long story short, he's running Windows 10 on a newer 3.7 Ghz Intel with 8 GB of RAM.

So, as I was looking through the programs installed on his machine, I noticed that he had something called Cyber Ghost, and also another VPN program which I don't recall the name of right at the moment.  So, I asked this friend of mine if hew was using a VPN, but he didn't know, so I just left the two programs installed on his machine.  If he were using a VPN, then wouldn't he have pay a monthly bill for the service?

I'm a little bit concerned about this, because I know that in the past his bank account was hijacked, so I'm wondering if someone could have put this software onto his machine as a means of gaining remote access to it.  What are some of the potential consequences of uninstalling this software if he is actually using a VPN?

[DaveLembke]

I'd suggest backing up his data, and a clean installation. Clean installs wont have any VPNs installed. And if he fell into any trap of letting anyone connect to it remotely somehow there can be backdoors hidden on the system. Some who are in the field of accessing peoples systems illegally dont make their presence known and they just monitor their host systems and information gather as much as they can and not necessarily go for instant malicious intent or ransom attack demanding money. Some out there add systems compromised to their collection of systems that can be used for DDoS attacks as zombies as DDoS attacks need strength in numbers of systems all attacking a target at the same time.

Full Clean install is best after a backup of data to external drive, thumb drive, or cloud storage of a Gmail account where you get 15GB free storage in the Google Drive.