CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

many online anti-malware sites you’ll need for access to anti-malware tools.
Finally, you can download and burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD. It
comes stocked with several antivirus and anti-malware programs, so you
won’t need any other tool. Find it at www.ultimatebootcd.com. The only
downside is that the anti-malware engines will quickly be out of date, as will
their malware libraries.
Once you get to a boot environment, update your anti-malware software
and then run its most comprehensive scan. Then check all removable media
that were exposed to the system, and any other machine that might have
received data from the system or that is networked to the cleaned machine. A
virus or other malicious program can often lie dormant for months before
anyone knows of its presence.
E-mail is still a common source of viruses, and opening infected e-mails is
a common way to get infected. Viewing an e-mail in a preview window
opens the e-mail message and exposes your computer to some viruses.
Download files only from sites you know to be safe and avoid the less
reputable corners of the Internet, the most likely places to pick up computer
infections.
EXAM TIP CompTIA considers the process of removing a virus part of
the remediation step. Since you can’t remediate a PC until after a virus is
gone, I’ve laid out the steps as you see here.
Remediate Malware infections can do a lot of damage to a system,
especially to sensitive files needed to load Windows, so you might need to
remediate formerly infected systems after cleaning off the drive or drives.
Remediation simply means that you fix things the virus or other malware
harmed. This can mean replacing corrupted Windows Registry files or even
startup files.
If you can’t start Windows after the malware scan is finished, you need to
boot to the Windows Preinstallation Environment and use the Windows
Recovery Environment/System Recovery Options.
With the Windows Recovery Environment (covered in detail in Chapter