Cleaning up after WMF Exploit – summary
Can I say enough times that after a bad trojan infestation you should format and reinstall? I’ve cleaned up the infested image that I “sacrificed” to the WMF exploit and as I’ve said you’re pestware install will likely be somewhat different. An exploit is just the road, the spyware and viruses are the cars. Once the road is built, just about any car can use it…. Hopefully the series has been helpful on working through some of the problems with a system cleaning.
Do I currently “trust” the image? No. It would take several more hours of virus scanning, anti-spyware scanning (at least two anti-spyware programs, probably 2 antivirus programs), network sniffing, replacement of pristine certifiable Microsoft files (for the 2 or three items that could have been replaced by trojaned files.) And even after all that there is still some doubt.
Antivirus and spyware scanners only know about what they’ve seen. If there is a new sneaky trojan that trojaned explorer.exe in all the other mess, I might not replace it and it could lurk unfound for a long time, maybe acting as a keylogger. Or maybe a rootkit used somy of Sony’s tricks to hide itself and I haven’t done a scan that would identify that kind of file hiding. Your best bet is to format and reinstall – think of a cleanup as an opportunity to get your files out. An even better opportunity to get your files out would be a linux boot cd and external hard drive…..