Musings of the Great Eric

Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible:

In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation.

“When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit,” Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here.

Ouch.

But yeah - that’s something I realized a while ago now. It seems whenever I put on my tech support hat, the problem is almost always malware, and I can’t remember the last time I was able to fix it short of reformatting the drive. The stuff just gets so deep in the system that you can’t kill it, even with repeated anti-spyware and AV scans.

It’s kind of disturbing to hear that come from Microsoft itself though.

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