“In a rare discussion on 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,” Ryan Naraine reports for eWeek.
“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,” Naraine reports. “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.’ …In February alone, [Microsoft’s] free Malicious Software Removal Tool detected a social engineering worm called Win32/Alcan on more than 250,000 unique machines.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Most of the world picked the wrong platform, that much is obvious.
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