[Hidden-tech] PC technician recommendations?

Chris Hoogendyk hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu
Mon Dec 7 17:32:14 EST 2009



Kevin Phillips wrote:
> I will spend about 1/2 hour on a system cleaning it up and trying to 
> remove everything before giving up and recommending a clean install.
> Yes it really is a pain to reload everything again but in the long 
> term you get a better experience.
> Badly infected Windows never seem's to recover properly.

Just as a general security note -- it is standard recommendation among 
sysadmins that, if you have an infected or hacked system, you wipe it 
and re-install. You just can't ever be sure that you have removed all 
backdoors or extraneous pieces of hacking kits. You might think you 
cleaned it up, and it ends up becoming fully reinfected very quickly 
because of some piece or backdoor that you didn't catch. If you have 
systematic backups, you might go back through them to determine when the 
infection occurred. And, If you can definitively tell when the infection 
first occurred, you might recover from those backups. But you really 
should wipe and either re-install or recover from known clean backups.


-- 
---------------

Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

--------------- 

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