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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[Dogmeat]

But, on the flip side of this, I still say the best prevention is to NOT have a shitty setup that allows malware to begin with.

On any computer I have ever personally run, my problems with malware/spyware have been at a minimum because when you kick the security settings on IE up a notch or two and only allow trusted sites to puke cookies, etc on your computer, and don't download and run every stupid ass peice of software you find, you virtually never have a problem with malware...

I don't know, I think that in the corporate world, I don't really feel sorry for these people because even with users being as brainless as they are you can still make a HUGE dent in the vulnerability of your systems by just simply not allowing a lotta "duh" stuff to go on ...