Like a lot of folks in the IT industry, whether you’re a software developer or in an infrastructure/support role, I seem to find myself sorting PCs and laptops after they’ve been infected with malware, spyware and/or viruses.

It’s something that I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog: Confidence Tricks and It’s a scam, it’s a hoax, but how do you know?

Sometimes the cause can be obvious, but asking the question “have you been looking at porn?” directly can be a little awkward and embarrassing.

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 “no”. This wasn’t the first time that I’d recovered this particular PC from viral infections after visits to the skin toned side of the Internet…so I wasn’t at all surprised to find the sites presented in the image below in the browser’s history. Incidentally, this is a carefully positioned view of the history list – there were some real shockers elsewhere in this history.

I suppose it helps us to see this kind content in the history, at least we then know what we’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’t be cleaned up within 45-60 minutes, the unit is flattened, paved, formatted and the re-installation process starts.

A PC rebuild was the order of the day in this case.

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