The Tale of my Battle with TDSS

Reminds me of the time I spent trying to clean up my daughters laptop. She managed to get it severally infected while away in college. I even got help via one of the forums who handles these things. In my case the only solution was to wipe it. Even that did not totally work. I couldn't get Windows to reinstall Ended up going with Linux. No problems now.

 

I understand your reasoning but I think always throwing in the towel and restoring an image seems silly, especially since most infections are straightforward to remove, granted TDSS is not.

He had no image, and no installation disc came with his laptop, so that was not an option. Even had I been able to reinstall Windows, I would have had to reinstall all his games, programs, etc. which could have taken longer than removing the infection. Plus I made the mistake of renaming services.exe, which is why it took longer to fix.

I know you can never be sure an infection is gone, but I'd say TDSSKiller and HitmanPro coming up clean is pretty reassuring.

Not to mention very few people I know seem to have large removable drives, and doing it with DVDs would be time consuming. Plus they would have to remember to do a monthly backup, which is unlikely.