(Off Topic) Windoze spam and corruption

Alex Hewitt hewitt_tech at comcast.net
Mon Feb 11 16:50:33 EST 2008


On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 12:21 -0500, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-02-11 at 10:16 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> (I agree with Ben, but am adding a little commentary.)
> > On Feb 11, 2008 8:55 AM,  <paul.cour1 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > > I have a Win XP machine that is terribly infested (Ugh!)
> 
> >   The only way to say for sure is to boot from trusted media and run
> > your investigations from there.
> > 
> 

One item I've found very useful for this is a small cable/USB interface
you can buy that let's you easily slave the hard drive from a PC and
perform your scans from a known good system. Here are pointers to one of
these devices:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156101

The small power cube that comes with the cable has enough juice to run
most 3.5 inch drives although I've found a few that wouldn't spin up.
You can also just plug in the cable to the drive and leave the power
connector plugged into the PC that it's running in. You plug the USB end
of the cable into the PC that you want to do your scanning from.

-Alex
> I've had some success over the years with Knoppix and now Fedora Live
> CD's.  You'll need enough ram to update the virus scanning software and
> signature files and will need to enable write access to the Windows
> filesystem.
> 
> The last time someone brought me a problem Windows box, its scans
> pronounced it clean, but monitoring the network showed lots of
> extraneous traffic.
> 
> Clam flagged the swap file (pagefile.sys), among others (which the
> windows scan had also reported and cleaned).  After removing the swap
> file and scrubbing the other files, the system booted cleanly in Windows
> and no problem traffic was detected on the network.
> 
> > > While my last and most effective option is to wipe drive and
> > reinstall
> > > Windoze, ...
> > 
> >   I'd argue your last and most effective option is to wipe the drive
> > and install Linux.  I'm not being a wise-guy, either.  Generally
> > speaking, there are satisfactory solutions for most of the "But I need
> > Windows ..." objections, and Linux can make one's life a lot better.
> > Big companies have to worry about all sorts of inertia, but
> > single-users can often switch easily.
> > 
> >   This group is full of people eager to help with such endevors.
> 
> A couple of years ago when my daughter complained about having her
> computer infested yet again, she finally agreed to try Linux.  That's
> worked OK.  It took a while to get the media stuff working to her
> satisfaction (watching DVD's, playing MP3 files, etc.), stuff I'd never
> been terribly concerned about.
> 



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