{"id":842,"date":"2008-09-07T10:47:40","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T09:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=842"},"modified":"2008-09-07T12:43:56","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T11:43:56","slug":"browser-history-can-help-determine-rebuild-vs-clean-up-but-can-be-revealing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=842","title":{"rendered":"Browser history can help determine rebuild vs clean up, but can be revealing&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like a lot of folks in the IT industry, whether you&#8217;re a software developer or in an infrastructure\/support role, I seem to find myself sorting PCs and laptops after they&#8217;ve been infected with malware, spyware and\/or viruses.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve written about elsewhere in this blog: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=508\">Confidence Tricks<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=470\">It\u2019s a scam, it\u2019s a hoax, but how do you know? <\/a><\/p>\n<p>Sometimes the cause can be obvious, but asking the question &#8220;have you been looking at porn?&#8221; directly can be a little awkward and embarrassing.  <\/p>\n<p>On one such occasion a few years ago, I knew that the PC had been used to view skin tones and the like, however I chose to ask the question anyway.  The response that I got back then was a resounding &#8220;no&#8221;.  This wasn&#8217;t the first time that I&#8217;d recovered this particular PC from viral infections after visits to the skin toned side of the Internet&#8230;so I wasn&#8217;t at all surprised to find the sites presented in the image below in the browser&#8217;s history.  Incidentally, this is a carefully positioned view of the history list &#8211; there were some <strong>real shockers<\/strong> elsewhere in this history.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/hacked-blog.gif\" \/> <\/p>\n<p>I suppose it helps us to see this kind content in the history, at least we then know what we&#8217;re dealing with.  If the history had been wiped, we may have wasted time trying to perform a clean up instead of a rebuild.  My threshold for rebuild vs. clean up is getting a lot lower.  If it can&#8217;t be cleaned up within 45-60 minutes, the unit is flattened, paved, formatted and the re-installation process starts.<\/p>\n<p>A PC rebuild was the order of the day in this case.<\/p>\n<p>Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/browser+history\" rel=\"tag\">browser history<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/virus+removal\" rel=\"tag\">virus removal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/spyware+removal\" rel=\"tag\">spyware removal<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/flatten\" rel=\"tag\">flatten<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/pave\" rel=\"tag\">pave<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/format\" rel=\"tag\">format<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/viral+infection\" rel=\"tag\">viral infection<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like a lot of folks in the IT industry, whether you&#8217;re a software developer or in an infrastructure\/support role, I seem to find myself sorting PCs and laptops after they&#8217;ve been infected with malware, spyware and\/or viruses. It&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve written about elsewhere in this blog: Confidence Tricks and It\u2019s a scam, it\u2019s a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=842\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Browser history can help determine rebuild vs clean up, but can be revealing&#8230;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}