Malware Dev Answers Questions on Reddit

[UserNameGoesHere]

I didn't click/read it or anything, but there is one very important point I want to make.

Once you are infected with anything there are two and only two ways to truly remedy that. One such way is to restore from a known good backup (saved on some medium other than the infected one, of course -- backup partitions on an infected hard drive are no good). The other way is to wipe the medium (fully 0-write it) and reinstall everything from scratch.

NOTHING apart from one of those two methods can guarantee the malware was removed, despite what anyone else tells you. (Keep in mind the computer repair place just wants your money and will run some programs which will remove some stuff and they'll do what they can but you can never be sure it is 100% except for one of the two above methods)

Also, if you have extremely rare firmware malware (in other words, it didn't just write data to your hard drive but it updated firmware in some piece of hardware) then even restoring from a known good backup or 0-writing the drive and reinstalling from scratch won't fix it. That kind of malware is very rare though since it generally can only be written to affect some very specific piece of hardware and unless you had that exact hardware, it does nothing.

Removal of firmware malware may/may not be possible depending on the hardware and depending on the infection.