What is PUA:Win32/Presenoker & Is It a Virus? [Answered]

Ariel Mu
4 min readMar 9, 2022

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According to user reports, the PUA Win32 Presenoker often appears after running a scan with Windows Security or Malwarebytes. Most of them suspect that Presenoker is a virus and want to remove it, such as this user from the Reddit forum:

I was running my daily scan with Malwarebytes and WD, Malwarebytes is clear and WD said it found PUA:Win32/Presenoker. The affected item is “file:C:\Users\My name\AppData\Local\NordVPN\Updates\channel-33\6.31.5.0\rumovr12.exe.https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comments/jdbuo6/windows_defender_found_puawin32presenoker/

What Is PUA:Win32/Presenoker

What is PUA Win32 Presenoker? Here PUA is known as Potentially Unwanted Applications that are categorized as grayware that can cause your computer to run slowly, display unexpected ads, or have an untoward impact on user security and privacy. It may contain adware, changes the browser settings, or other unclear objects.

The Presenoker refers to a nebulous grey area between dangerous malware and legitimate application. Usually, the browser hajakets, torrent, and some types of adware are classified into PUA Win32 Presenoker. For example, the Torrent clients and NordVPN are the types of apps that are flagged by Windows Defender as PUAs.

These PUAWin32 Presnoker items are not fully eliminated by your Windows Security or antivirus. They are usually blocked by your antivirus software and then left behind in the “Detection History” folder. However, Windows Defender Security keeps scanning for these programs (uTorrent) and flags them as PUA:Win32/Presenoker.

Is PUA Win32 Presenoker a Virus

Is PUA Win32 Presnoker a virus? Although PUA has a general impact on the system performance or user experience, it is not considered as a virus and it’s rather a false positive. According to a survey, the programs and apps that have no publisher will be flagged as PUA:Win32/Presenoker.

How to Remove the Presenoker Virus

Although the Presenoker item is not dangerous, many users want to remove it. Here are 2 simple ways to delete it.

Way 1. Delete the DetectionHistory Folder in File Explorer

As mentioned above, the PUA Presenoker items are left behind in the DetectionHistory folder. To remove the Presenoker virus, you can delete the folder in File Explorer.

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service

Step 2. Inside the Service folder, press Ctrl + A keys to select all files and folders, and then press the Delete key.

Step 3. Navigate to the following directory and open the CacheManager folder.

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\Scans\History\CacheManager

Way 2. Delete the Presenoker Virus by Resetting Browser Settings

If you receive the PUA:Win32/Presenoker notification due to the changes of browser settings, you can remove it by resetting the browser settings to the default status. Here we take Google Chrome for example.

Step 4. Click on Reset Settings in the pop-up confirmation dialog. Then the PUA Presenoker notification should be removed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Position: Columnist

Ariel is an enthusiastic IT columnist focusing on partition management, data recovery, and Windows issues. She has helped users fix various problems like PS4 corrupted disk, unexpected store exception error, the green screen of death error, etc. If you are searching for methods to optimize your storage device and restore lost data from different storage devices, then Ariel can provide reliable solutions for these issues.

Originally published at https://www.partitionwizard.com on March 9, 2022.

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