[SpamCop-List] Re: outlook hi-jack

[eddie]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 21:55:30 -0700, Paul Johnson scratched out the
following:

snip uncompromised
> state.  You need to do the following in order:
> 
> 1) Physically disconnect from the Internet.  You should have done this
>    already, the moment you knew you were compromised.
> 
> 2) Dispose of all backups from the time you were compromised to
>    present.  They are no longer good.
> 
> 3) Format your hard drive completely, you can no longer trust anything
>    there.
snap

If you ghost or clone your harddrive at regular intervals with Norton or
PowerQuest, you do not need to perform such a harsh act as scrubbing and
reinstalling. Both these pieces of software will restore your HD to the
previous state, bit by bit, without the need for anything special.
I ghost my HD whenever I try some new beta software, and I will ghost it
when the SP2 comes out for XP. It's infinitely better than SystemRestore,
and, so far, without problem. You can even create a boot CD or floppy to
automate the process if you replace your drive or if it's corrupted beyond
repair. 
This method restores all the patches, updates etc that you painfully
installed and which take so much time when rebuilding a system the
old-fashioned way.