M$ Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible Options

[dauss]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.asp

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.—In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation.

"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here.

Offensive rootkits, which are used hide malware programs and maintain an undetectable presence on an infected machine, have become the weapon of choice for virus and spyware writers and, because they often use kernel hooks to avoid detection, Danseglio said IT administrators may never know if all traces of a rootkit have been successfully removed.

He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. "In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast," Danseglio added.

Danseglio, who delivered two separate presentations at the conference—one on threats and countermeasures to defend against malware infestations in Windows, and the other on the frightening world on Windows rootkits—said anti-virus software is getting better at detecting and removing the latest threats, but for some sophisticated forms of malware, he conceded that the cleanup process is "just way too hard."

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[Rocky]

Assumption that everybody even has PXE capabilities.


Also, do you seriously understand the logistics of just trying to fire off that many remote installations ? Talk about crippling the network. It's obviously under production from 8-5, but there are more proccesses going on after hours as well.

You can't just switch over to Linux. It sounds so e-cool, but when you have god knows how many millions of dollars of projects nonstop underway that rely on current GIS apps and more that engineering teams are trained to work on under MS environments....not an option.


I'm just tryin to say; its so easy to spout off things about how large networks are dealing with issues like this and more, but its another thing when you actually work with it, and actually are talking about a real network in production.