There are
no guarantees or shortcuts when it comes to malware removal, especially when dealing with
backdoor Trojans,
Botnets,
IRCBots or
rootkit components that can hook into the Windows 32-bit kernel, and patch several APIs to hide new registry keys and files they install. Infections will vary and some will cause more harm to your system then others as a result of it having the ability to download more malicious files. Security tools that claim to be able to remove rootkits
cannot guarantee that all traces of it will be removed as they may not find all the remnants.
Many experts in the security community believe that once infected with this type of malware, the best course of action is to wipe the drive clean,
reformat and reinstall the OS. Your decision as to what action to take should be made by reading and asking yourself the questions presented in these articles:
This is what Jesper M. Johansson at Microsoft TechNet has to say:
Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do?.
The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild. That’s right. If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).
Edited by quietman7, 04 September 2010 - 02:41 PM.