My idiot question of the week

[leigh6]

Hi all,

A friends emachine was hugely infected. Ended up transfering his entire hard drive (5gigs of info) to another hard drive and reformating his computer.

Now my question. The hard drive I transfered everything to was a test computer I had with a clean hard drive (10 gigs) and an operating system. Did I transfer the infected files also? He only wants to take 100 pictures of his kids off the drive and then I will wipe it clean. Will those files be infected also?

I am lost.

Leigh

 

[Concillian]

pictures will not be 'infected'

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you copied everything, chances are you copied infected files too.

Does this second system have its own installed OS, or is the copied infected OS the only one on that PC? If it has a safe OS:

Go to http://www.free-av.com/ for (surprise!) a free AV program. Download, install, scan, clean, then copy the files you want.

JPEGs _can_ now be infected with a buffer overrun virus.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Concillian
pictures will not be 'infected'

Not true. buffer overrun exploit(s) exist, and .NET and MS Office are both vulnerable.

 

[leigh6]

I ran 10 different anti virus and anti spyware/malware programs in the first place on the system. 3 days of hijack this, spybot, etc was getting me nowhere so I did the transfer thingy.

The system I transferred it too has an OS on it and nothing else. Just a small 10 gig hard drive (I have used the comp to test Sdram memory).

Figured no great loss if the drive gets infected. Would just wipe it clean after I get the files off.

 

[DaveSimmons]

As long as you run an up-to-date good virus checker like AntiVir (see site above) on the new system you should be fine.

You failed on the old system because the infections were already active and had their hooks into Windows. With nothing like that on the new system the virus scanner should run without being corrupted or otherwise interfered with.

 

[dnuggett]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Concillian
pictures will not be 'infected'

Not true. buffer overrun exploit(s) exist, and .NET and MS Office are both vulnerable.

QFT