HTML/CSS An HTML and computer securIty question

[1oldman2]

In the norton forums, they think that there is a malware in my PC and recommend that I should refer to a free malware cleaning website. But this situation confuses me because are malwares a different situation for antiviruses? Attacks continued until the morning but now they finished.

I have great luck with Safer networking S&D forums give them a try.

 

[Routaran]

Hey mech-eng,
Be very careful with moving data between this computer and another device. Often, these infections have the capacity to infect usb drives as well as a means to spread. Disable USB autoplay on all your computers as a precaution. If you have file sharing enabled on your computers, disable it as well to protect the rest of your network.

The suggestions provided here are good, hopefully you were able to recover your files with the tool you were using.

Going forward, do not use the computer even if you were able to recover your data and the antivirus gives you the all clear. There is always the chance that a root kit was also installed in which case the system maybe hiding stuff from you and your antivirus.

I very strongly recommend that you do a full wipe and reinstall Windows before you resume normal work on this computer.

 

[StevieTNZ]

Hey mech-eng,
Be very careful with moving data between this computer and another device. Often, these infections have the capacity to infect usb drives as well as a means to spread. Disable USB autoplay on all your computers as a precaution. If you have file sharing enabled on your computers, disable it as well to protect the rest of your network.

The suggestions provided here are good, hopefully you were able to recover your files with the tool you were using.

Going forward, do not use the computer even if you were able to recover your data and the antivirus gives you the all clear. There is always the chance that a root kit was also installed in which case the system maybe hiding stuff from you and your antivirus.

I very strongly recommend that you do a full wipe and reinstall Windows before you resume normal work on this computer.

I concur with what Routaran has said.

 

[mech-eng]

Going forward, do not use the computer even if you were able to recover your data and the antivirus gives you the all clear. There is always the chance that a root kit was also installed in which case the system maybe hiding stuff from you and your antivirus. I very strongly recommend that you do a full wipe and reinstall Windows before you resume normal work on this computer. .

Hi, for above, what does "antivirus gives you the all clear" refer to and "system maybe hiding stuff" refer to and "do a full wipe" refer to?

Thank you.

 

[Routaran]

Hi, for above, what does "antivirus gives you the all clear" refer to and "system maybe hiding stuff" refer to and "do a full wipe" refer to?

Thank you.

antivirus gives you the all clear: When you do scans on your system, the antivirus reports that no infections found.

system maybe hiding stuff: Rootkits are specialized programs that may be bundled with malware which are meant to literally hide programs on the system. They reside in the kernel (the program that directly interacts with the hardware on the computer) and then filter out information to hide their existence from the operating system. So if you were to search for the rootkit, it won't show up. These are the most dangerous type of malware because you will have no evidence that they even exist on the system.

do a full wipe: I suggested this because after an infection occurs on the system, there's always a possibility that the malware may have also installed a rootkit. Because cryptolocker variants require time to encrypt all the data on a system, this infection must have been present on the system for some time. As a result, if it was my system, i would not be able to trust that a rootkit wasn't also installed. these infections often install backdoors as well allowing others to install things like rootkits. I would do a wipe once i knew i had all the data i could recover.
A full wipe means formatting your computer's hard drive (this erases absolutely everything from the computer including any rootkits that may be present) and then reinstalling windows from scratch.

After a wipe and reinstall of windows, then I'd be fairly certain that the system can be trusted when the antivirus says that there are no infections.