It seems to me that when a computer is infested with malware, becomes unusable, and the user has lost productivity, costing them money AND possibly service calls, the advertisers, or manufacturers of the malware should be liable for actual and punative damages.
I know of a company that had critical data on a computer that was infested. I couldn't just wipe the drive and then reinstall everything. I had to remove the hard drive, install it as a secondary drive, and clean it, save her data, then wipe and reinstall her OS and applications. She was without her computer for two days, and the service cost her about $1200. Her lost productivity probably cost her over two thousand dollars as well.
If we can't hold them legally liable, there should be some sort of justifiable clause in the assault laws, where it's OK if you can prove somebody is behind the malware, you can beat the crap out of them!
Mark
You should have been able to clean it from her machine in about 2 hours. What you did was pretty extreme. I'm to the point now that I can get a machine uninfected and armored in a couple hours. Most of the time is simply waiting on the scans to finish. I agree that they(spyware authors) should be held liable for damages, but it is not necessary to kill the drive entirely.
I've had some machines that literally started throwing popups as soon as the desktop appears. A new one would come at you 10-15 seconds later. It would never get to a point that you could function. 100% utilization. Some have had multiple trojans that don't allow themselves to be removed when not in safe mode. Still a few others required me to enter safemode Dos prompt to kill them. The fact is, you CAN kill all of them and if any system files are damaged, you simply expand them out of cabs files.
My FR homepage has more detail.
"If we can't hold them legally liable, there should be some sort of justifiable clause in the assault laws, where it's OK if you can prove somebody is behind the malware, you can beat the crap out of them!"
Can we use axe handles?