did you catch this?

[mbossman2]

Microsoft (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.asp) says recovery from malware is becoming impossible....and hard drive wipes soon may be the only solution

[Statica]

I dont know whether to take that as (a) an acknowledgement of the inherent vulnerabilities of the platform (b) a dig at companies like Sony going their own way with their system of DRM or (c) the press release for Microsoft Windows Nuke and Pave 2006 Pro Live

[pam123]

I dont know whether to take that as (a) an acknowledgement of the inherent vulnerabilities of the platform (b) a dig at companies like Sony going their own way with their system of DRM or (c) the press release for Microsoft Windows Nuke and Pave 2006 Pro Live


I'm feeling Quixotic so I go for (c).

[Floppyman]

"Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity," he said.

Yep.

[HAL9000]

Their "recommendation" is something that I was doing with businesses for years. A Ghost image would be on the server, if a system was screwed up, they simply booted from a bootdisk that I supplied them with... the disk would connect the machine to the network, gain access to the ghost image and reload the computer in about 5 minutes. The one time when they had a virus flying around the workstations, all I did was boot each of the 25 machines from the disk and do a check on the server and all was good as new in about an hour.

[Mesaeus]

"Impossible" would be the wrong word for a clean up in that case. "Not worth the trouble and/or expense" might be better. What can be done, can be undone except in extreme cases (like a full hard disk wipe). But yes I can easily see it come to a point where it's useless to try to clean up a spyware infested system and a wipe/reinstall is better. Allready I have to spend much time to get some agressive spyware removed. Things like "About:This", Aurora and Coolwebsearch are continually evolving and getting better at sinking their sharp claws in Windows' soft underbelly.

But don't forget that a reinstall doesn't end when Windows is loading and the device drivers are reinstalled. Getting the system back to the customization and the additional programs the user likes, will take many many additional hours. Unless you regularly use ghost and/or make sure your data is separate from the system disk, even a ghost backup like HAL9000 suggests might not suffice.