Linux to kill windoze viruses, worms, trojans, spywares, etc.
 

Hi!

Sadly, sometimes, I have to clean-up badly infected, trojaned, wormmed, spied windoze machine. And it takes hell lot of my time. Hours!!! And, if I don't bring the appropriate disk, got to download multiple cleaner programs from the Internet. And often times, the compromised machine will not download anything for you, cause it is too busy trying to infect others.

Now, I want to know whether is it feasible to use Linux with appropriate software to clean up the mess? Is there enough software tools for Linux to do it effectively? If yes, please advice what are the softwares and what do they clean?

And, I would love a oopss, switch which will corrupt the harddisk even worst so that they forget about using Windoze. :D

p.s. I use Slackware-current

i don't know of a specific Linux distro made for doing rescue and cleanup of an infected Windows box, but you can try ClamAV installed to your current Linux distro, if you have a NTFS filesystem you might have problems...

http://www.clamav.net/

Probably not, and probably won't ever happen. Aside from the issue of writing to NTFS there is the fact that the malware writers are winning the race. They can and are changing their toxic code faster than the white hats can keep up. They stick stuff in the registry (which is hard to service from outside of Windows) and they hide stuff all over the system - including replacing system executables and dlls with their own versions.

The only way to survive this is to avoid being infected in the first place. I also clean up other peoples' systems for fun and profit, and I have gotten to the point where, when I find a badly infected system, I just scroll off the user data, wipe, reformat, and reinstall. That is the route that takes the least amount of time (and the least amount of my clients' money). I then implement a secure environment for them before turning it over to them. And I educate them on how to stay safe. So long as they listen to me, their systems remain clean - or nearly so.

i totally agree Jim, thats why abandoned Windows completely, i wont have it on my computers, Windows is just more trouble than its worth...

Don't worry, there are some distros made for forensic uses and are all free.
One distro that I can come up with is F.I.R.E

http://biatchux.dmzs.com/

Anyway the most extreem remedy that I can come upwith is to re-install windows and before that, save your important files on your linux distro.

Using anti-viruses on linux for windows is somewhat a bit strange and takes experience.