DACS Malware Removal Toolkit –
Part 4 – How to Protect Your Computer so that You can Easily Recover from Malware
Strategies that everyone should use, to prepare for recovery:
- Backup your data drive regularly
- Backup your programs drive (meaning the c: drive)
- Create a bootable CD
Additional strategies, if you want to be especially careful:
- Partition your drive … so that you have separate partitions for programs and data.
- Don’t trust Microsoft’s “Image Restore”, as it is not dependable
- Run a baseline scan of HiJackThis. This application makes a log of the open processes. If you have a baseline from a time when there was no malware, you can compare a later log … to see help determine if your computer has malware.
Info about backing up the c drive:
- You need a special program to backup the c drive … because (think about it) you are trying to back up the drive on which Windows is currently running while you are doing the backup!
Special Programs for Backing Up the c Drive:
- Acronis TrueImage
- Norton Ghost
Info about bootable CD
- This CD will boot the computer, even if it will not start normally. This CD will also start the computer, without involving the boot sector of the c: drive or other applications that start automatically … thereby avoiding certain malware upon startup.
- This CD is sometimes alternately called a rescue disk.
- You need to create this bootable CD before you have a problem.
Following are some sources of programs to create a bootable CD:
- Avira Rescue CD
- Rescue CD
- AVG Rescue CD
- BitDefender Rescue USB
- F-Secure Rescue CD
- Kaspersky Rescue Disk
- SystemRescueCD
- Trinity Rescue CD
- UBCD4Win
- Secure2k BootCD
- Ubuntu LiveCD
Following are sources of HiJackThis:
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