Antivirus

[NoOp]

On 06/17/2008 09:16 AM, Michael "TheZorch" Haney wrote:

> 
> This next story will likely scare the hell out of some people, well the 
> computer novices at least.  I was working on someone's computer one 
> day.  They're XP installation brew up and nothing was working right.  I 
> have no idea how they messed it up the way they did but they did.  I ran 
> several tools to see if they had malware and viruses and sure enough 
> they did.  This person already had their data backed up so I reinstalled 
> XP wiping the disk and partition while I was at it.  

And that most likely was your problem. The last thing that you should do
is reinstall from a backup as in nearly all cases all that they've done
is back up infected files. You restored those infected files back onto
the system. If you are going to reinstall backup files, be sure to scan
the files thoroughly before reinstalling them, and even then only
restore necessary data files.

It is much better to 'clean' the existing system, and then backup the
clean system. I've not found an infected system (so far) that I couldn't
clean with the exception of one. And on that system I wiped the entire
drive (including boot sectors) and reinstalled a fresh system.