Re: Virus Removal

On Nov 11, 7:04 am, "The Todal" <deadmail...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
"AlanG" <inva...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:cluif59h46diuhfa04odgi4lvajne46q0n@xxxxxxxxxx



On Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:09:40 -0000, "The Todal" <deadmail...@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Here's the scenario: your office computer is infected with a virus and
won't
boot into XP. Your company uses its usual IT support contractor to cure
the
problem - they take the computer away, keep it in their workshop for
nearly
a week and then return it to you. But they have formatted the HD and
reinstalled Windows, leaving everything else to be reinstalled.

That is unacceptable, right?  They should at least warn you before they
plan
to erase everything on your disk, yes?

No. They have every expectation that a commercial operation would
ensure backups of data are held elsewhere. But if they are the IT
support people then it is their job to make sure all applications are
reinstalled and settings to the company preferred standard.

I was actually misinformed by the technician, who was under the impression
that the disk had been reformatted and Windows XP reinstalled.  I am now
told that they put in a new hard disk and copied over what they could from
the old hard disk (as it turns out, they dumped all that in a subdirectory
on the disk).

Nothing valuable has been lost, but it is a lot of time and effort to
reinstall the software and reconfigure the machine so that it works as
before.

Next time I'll instruct them to assess the problem and advise before they
take any steps.  And I am surprised that they haven't explained to me why
they couldn't eradicate the virus and fix the damaged system files. My own
virus scan had revealed the virus to be Virut. Even if it did replace some
vital system files with its corrupt versions, doesn't a good computer
support technician have ways of repairing that?

The average technician is dependent on virus clean-up tools that are
available to him or her and can only hope they do a 100% cleanup.

I dealt with a virus situation for someone a month ago, and while I
think I dealt with it, I am not 100% happy and I will be backing up
user data and re-imaging the HD with a 'trusted' earlier verson. The
other reason for doing this is it gets rid of all the rubbish that
tends to accumulate in the HD and in the registry.

A top notch technician may be able to 'tidy up' a PC that has a virus
and is full of other rubbish without the need to start from scratch,
but they do not grow on trees nor come cheaply. They are likely to be
engaged on forensic work or on data recovery from hard discs that go
'ker-bang.'

Funny thing, when people lose data they subsequently become very
paranoid about backups.

There was a case of people in a city of 80000 people who woke up to
find their phones would not work. The database of the phone exchange
was lost during the night and the backup tapes would not work.
Finally a 6 month old tape was found which did reload which got about
80% of connections going again and staff had then to manually update
the rest. A very senior manager had to hurridly start looking for new
career opportunities.
.

Relevant Pages

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