> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Betsy Schwartz > > My mother's computer was compromised. She installed what I suspect was > probably malware, thinking she was installing anti-virus software, and I think > she may have done business with scammers. She caught on, but it was too > late.
I can't recommend a person, but I can say this: In over a decade, I've cleaned out at least dozens, perhaps hundreds of viruses/malware from peoples' computers, with 100% failure rate. Invariably, no matter how well you clean it - even when you use a specialized tool like the McAfee SoBig Removal tool or whatever - produced by a legitimate antivirus company, specifically to clean out a specific infection - 100% of the time, the virus gets itself back in later. Could be minutes, hours, or days. There is only one option to successfully clean an infection. The nuclear option. Ideally, you would have regular whole-system backups, such as Acronis TrueImage, so you could just restore the whole system to the state it was in a few days ago. But this tends to be too complex for typical users to live with. (Unless you have an IT person managing it for you.) Depending on her model of computer, it's very likely that she can press some key sequence during power-on, to enter a system recovery mode, to reset the computer back to factory condition. Alternatively, she may have system recovery discs, or she may need to obtain system recovery discs from the manufacturer. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
