Is there a good diagnostic tool for root kits?
I have only had one, and the simple solution was to reload the system.
I have used SchmidtFraudFix (spelling may not be right) on a really nasty bug, think it was complements of the U.S. Gov. Made a mistake one day chasing news and wound up on a militia site and after a few moments something shut down my system and my anti-virus program had to neutralize it each time I rebooted. Used every tool in my tool kit and nothing worked, one of our IT guys told me about that tool and it worked. It is a totally command line tool for really nasty stuff.
not a Mac thing but thought this might be of interest to you, because, well, it’s not a Mac thing.
I’m on the Avast forums as an “evangelist”, who rids your pc of rootkits and malware but I won’t tell you which one to avoid the trolls.
The best tools are the free ones, and it’s not who you use them but to understand how they work. For basics, you AV will not protect you 100%. The top 3 tools you should have is Malwarebytes (free, but I prefer the pro), GMER and Combofix. GMER used to scan then fix the rootkit and malware but the ‘fix” part sucks nowadays so Combofix does the trick.
For the TDL hard cases, DDS does the trick and WHEN the TDL’s really get wild and re-write the MS Windows registry and open a backdoor for future invasions which it does, OTS corrects the registry for you.
It’s nice to know that in the past years I’ve done this, I have never given up on a pc and told me clients to re-boot the system to the orig. factory settings. There is ALWAYS a way to save your files from the hard drive and all that work should always be saved.