The Real Malware Cleanup Problem Is at Home

Personally, I saw it as an acknowledgement of what reasonable people have known for years. Cleaning up malware has always been a major feature of anti-virus software, but its become increasingly undesirable (Ill stop short of "useless"). There are better options, as Mike Danseglio, a program manager in Microsofts Security Solutions group, said. The solutions are out there for enterprises. The goal should be to make them reasonably available to consumers and small businesses.

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Even the anti-virus guys agree with Danseglio, at least in private. I asked a couple of anti-virus industry people and they said that of course its more desirable to re-image a system. The advantages are huge.

• Theres a very high likelihood of success with re-imaging. There are theoretical ways for an attack to slip past a re-imaging, but theyre highly unlikely and most of them, such as EFI-based attacks, can be dealt with through thorough procedure.
• There are many good systems available at an enterprise level for managing system images, including tools that come with Windows. If you manage them correctly, recovering a system image can be relatively quick and easy.
• Good management practices dictate a system in which all data and user customizations are stored in the profile on the server. Being able to swap in a new image with ease is one of the benefits of following this good practice.
• System cleanups can have adverse consequences, breaking applications in some cases. Even where they appear to succeed, the cleaned-up system can not be trusted as it was before infection.
• Cleanup can be a long and complicated process, often involving much expert time. Re-imaging, when set up properly, can be a relatively automatic procedure performed without any complicated decision making.

Im sure most enterprises dont actually live in the neat-and-clean world of best-practices that Ive described, but they know its what they should strive for. They also know, or should know, that cleanup is a sub-optimal process.

Next page: Home users have it tough.