In the next few days (but don’t hold your breath, they maybe not so few), I’m planning to publish a few posts dealing with computer security. There I will analyze the effectiveness of currently available security software and deal with reactive, proactive and behavioral defense from malware. But, since you may already be infected (and by saying that I mean: since you ARE already infected, very probably) here is a quick tip: trying to disinfect an heavily compromised system can prove an hard task, even if you use several removal tools (ranging from resident antivirus, online scanners, antispyware, locked files removal tools, registry monitor applications, etc) , since some malware exhibits rootkit behavior, effectively hiding itself from security softwares and resisting heavily to any removal attempt. In these situations, you could find the removal process less painful if you use a recovery boot CD packed with an antivirus. These boot CDs are usually made of a customized Linux distro plus a commercial Antivirus software (there are a few using only GPL software, but the detection rate of ClamAV is notably lower than the commercial solutions). Most of the commercial antivirus producers have their own solution (and if you google a bit, you’ll find their download locations), but here I will only suggest you three of them:

1. Kaspersky Rescue Disk (this one doesn’t feature auto update, so you should always download the latest one from Kaspersky Web site);
2. F-secure Rescue CD;
3. BitDefender Rescue CD.

If your PC is not infected beyond any hope, one of these recovery CDs could do the trick and let you have a disinfected system again, avoiding the painful process of complete reinstallation of Windows and all of your apps.

Show/Hide Comment form