I was just wondering what should one do when infected by either of these threats I read a few messages in the Malware Removal Forums.All of them seems to says its hopeless
and format is the only was!
Is their no chance other than format if hit by Virut,Ramnit
I understand Experts out their could fix but people from Bleeping,Geekstogo
All says its time to throw the towel
Is this adviced to save a lot of time or to ensure no trace of infection are left??
Here are the links which suggest Format as an option
Author uses the approach I have used in the past which is to do scans with multiple bootable recovery CDs from different AV manufacturers to cleanup the PC to the point where it will boot and allow further clean-up using PC resident tools.
I would start with Norton's NBRT CD. Hopefully you previously created that? You can download other free bootable recovery CDs from AVG, Avira, F-Secure, and Bit-Defender. Kapersky also has one but the Linux kernel they use wouldn't work on my PC. Obviously, you will have to do these downloads on another PC which has CD burning software capable of created a bootable CD from a .iso image.
Once your PC is free of most of the nastiest malware, you then boot the PC into Windows and continue the clean up using conventional malware removal software.
Note that doing all the above does not guaranty that all malware will be removed.
BTW - backing up up your important files, reformatting, and reinstalling sometimes is actually faster than doing the above.
To bad you didn't use a good disk backup to create periodic disk images of your OS partition. An image restore would have taken only minutes to accomplish and you would be as good as new.
Is their any use in referring them to them Malware Removl Forums?
Each user has a different situation. Some people have their entire life stored on their PCs. In that case, the effort to save or at least recover as much as possible is probably worth the effort. Others have a few application programs installed, have original installation media for them, and have little else other that Word .docs and the like that can be off loaded to external media. In the later case, it's more time efficient to wipe the HDD and reinstall. You also have the peace of mind that you have a clean PC.
I also wonder at this never ending aversion for the average PC user to fully backup their PC. I guess that is the difference between PC and Mac users - PC users are masochists!
BTW -:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB7BWfXvcn8 Did you notice the author was running all those recovery CDs from his virtual machine? VM is the next anti-malware. Get infected. So what. Wipe out your virtual partition, rebuild it , and your off and running.
To bad you didn't use a good disk backup to create periodic disk images of your OS partition. An image restore would have taken only minutes to accomplish and you would be as good as new.
If only everyone did this. What a boring forum we would have. There is not much a backup image can't fix - and quickly at that! Viruses, ransomware, system instabilities, hard drive failures, missing files........ All easily fixable if people would only make the small investment in an imaging program and an external hard drive and use them.
Quads loved removing Virut,CF and Ramnit from my PC yum, without wiping or reformating the Hard Drive, just removing the infections, working out instructions for removal, that at least one or two user on this forum used with success,
Then getting Norton updated, to handle Ramnit nicely.
what can average users like me do anything if my Pc is hit?
@Send of Jive
I know Imaging tools are important but just wanted to know what should be the best action done when we don`t have a backup
Also will running system in limited account instead of Admin help prevent the infection??
@ Donz
Thanks for the reply
Virtual does take quite a lot of resources
Virtual Box infact cuased my Pc to crash when i was try Acronis Ghost a few CD writing software just to see how well the option are provided and how easy to use they are
Not that long, when I worked out the instrctions from scratch, and even faster now with Norton correctly dealing with the infected files after the break, and hopefully all or most files that run can also now be stopped successfully.
It's not my fault if most people even on the other forums can't do what I can do. It doesn't matter what other forums can or can't do, I know I can stop the likes or Ramnit and then with the help of Norton after SSR team gladly added what I gave them, successfully cleaned the hundreds of files.
Found another forum that used my instructions by a user but modified at least part of it, by manually in some way editing the registry, but instead of just removing the Ramnit added piece on the Winlogon entry, deleted the Winlogon entry.
On a restart the user ended up with the logon / logoff loop, because Windows no longer had the userinit.exe registry entry.
