Removing malware is best done from the outside

Crikey. They got screwed twice over, and it could have got worse for them. That's one crazy story.

 

Thanks for that Ronjor, Ive learnt something new today!

 

"Removing malware is best done from the outside"

We veteran BartPE CD/DVD users have known this for years.

 

As do we not quite as veteran UBCD4Win users.

 

How would these CDs you refer to help?

 

They are "live" CD's which the user boots off of, then the various scanning/cleaning tools from the CD are used to scan for and clean or remove the infected files on the hard drive which are dormant because the O/S is not loaded; it is only the CD's environment which is loaded into memory. The dormant state of the infected files makes them far less resistant to the removal attempts of the CD's anti-malware programs.

Although I've been an advocate of these live cds, I prefer the use of image/restore software for restoring systems that have been ravaged by viruses or various other issues such as user-imposed tweaks that were done wrong (been there before ) or an install that's gone terribly wayward. The restoring of an image can put a system back to an earlier, pristine state before the viral attack. Live cds, however, can clean most or even all the infection but not, perhaps, before the malware caused some irrevocable and undesirable changes to the system beforehand.

 

These are a couple of bootable CD's that I have used. I especially like AVIRA's (mainly because it seems to have the best PC hardware compatibility).

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1517040&postcount=6