eBay scam question

npminard · Post by **npminard** » Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:32 am

guitar007 wrote:
npminard wrote:
45auto wrote:EVERYBODY needs to have the best firewall & antivirus they can get. & get used to formatting & reloading! I hear the Komodo free firewall is decent. I'm still trying to find one to work better with Vista!
I was reading that formatting your hard drive isn't really a solution as it doesn't remove the virus, but instead buries it deeper. Has anyone else read that?

Not sure if the folks trying to steal my account got it off an auction b/c I haven't purchased anything from the site in a year.
Reformatting your hard drive will take care of a virus...but it's a lot of work and should be a last resort...unless you're into that kind of thing.

Perhaps I misunderstood, for some reason I thought that a virus is left in the "background" when one reformats. That's good to know though. There's actually good PC/anti-virus forums out there that'll guide you through deleting bad registry key entries.

JeffG. · Post by **JeffG.** » Mon Jun 11, 2007 6:04 pm

npminard wrote:
45auto wrote:EVERYBODY needs to have the best firewall & antivirus they can get. & get used to formatting & reloading! I hear the Komodo free firewall is decent. I'm still trying to find one to work better with Vista!
I was reading that formatting your hard drive isn't really a solution as it doesn't remove the virus, but instead buries it deeper. Has anyone else read that?

Not sure if the folks trying to steal my account got it off an auction b/c I haven't purchased anything from the site in a year.

It will depend on the malware... I would blow away the partition as well as well because some of these will bury themselves in the master boot record. Format from a clean boot disk, not one generated from the system after it has been infected.

Just my opinion, but part of the 'cure' should be to correct those problems that allowed the infection to occur in the first place. The reason being that you will just get nailed again, and while you can always go through that same procedure to restore the system, the entire time you are infected your security is compromised, and who knows what information you are allowing some nimrod to access.

I run AVG here on all the systems and it has worked well for us so far. The other thing that has helped is we use a hardware firewall. There are so many out there, and they are so cheap now that its well worth the investment.