Lost Everything and have to hand in IT coursework tomorrow...HELP

ddoris

Very interesting points made by asbokid -probably going under most readers' heads.
Was the course-work there to be rescued/recovered/backed-up and given in the next day ?

loobyloo2

Morning All

Just about to drop her and her laptop off to school, will show this thread to the technician and hope he/she can recover her work.
Haven't read through all the latest posts yet, but Thanks guys for all your wonderful help. Will be back on here with the outcome this evening, fingers crossed it will be a good result.

cgk1

I have heard that Microsoft just "buys" university departments that are too critical of its software. The university is offered a grant from the Corporation that is so massive it cannot possibly be refused on the grounds of preserving academic freedom..

Gawd - is this old chestnut still going? you need to come upto date, now when people tell this tall-tale, it's got google or apple in it.

JasX

Probably an 'unhelpful' comment but wouldn't a GCSE IT student be expected to know what backups are, why they are important and make sure their important stuff is suitably stored.....

......I can see a marking appeal for an improved GCSE IT grade on grounds of substantial coursework being lost due to no backup being made not getting very far.


Not to mention the importance of antivirus and not clicking strange popups from the internet :doh:

I'd be giving a D I'm afraid

free4440273

JasX wrote: »

Probably an 'unhelpful' comment but wouldn't a GCSE IT student be expected to know what backups are, why they are important and make sure their important stuff is suitably stored.....

......I can see a marking appeal for an improved GCSE IT grade on grounds of substantial coursework being lost due to no backup being made not getting very far.


Not to mention the importance of antivirus and not clicking strange popups from the internet :doh:

I'd be giving a D I'm afraid

agreed (and does not help OP , lol ) but take a look at the ICT syllabus ! what a joke :rotfl: written by, marked by , taught by a bunch of morons ! ICT Teacher (def. ): can hold a piece of chalk and wear a tie/blouse :rotfl::rotfl:

RussJK

asbokid wrote: »

that's a great analogy! there's a recent masters thesis here on windows rootkits that i am just flicking through.. it's quite interesting and well written.
http://sce.uhcl.edu/yang/research/A%20Comparitive%20Analysis%20of%20Rootkit%20Detection%20Techniques.pdf

Was a really good read so appreciate that; I've been looking for something with a broad overview of rootkits and the efficacy of the detectors. Interesting that a whole slew of them stopped being developed in 2008, and I didn't realise AVZ was so far out of date.

With rootkits, I wonder how much the recovery partitions can be trusted not to have been altered at some point. Hard to tell, because the people who suspect it never seem to wipe the MBR.

asbokid

cgk1 wrote: »

Gawd - is this old chestnut still going? you need to come upto date, now when people tell this tall-tale, it's got google or apple in it.

Well sure.. I dare say those corporations, just like Microsoft, use their "philanthropy" to buy the acquiescence of critics in academia.

It happens all the time in most industries, not just the IT industry.

For example, the pharmaceutical giants routinely "donate" vast sums of money to university research groups. You can be sure that this financing is made on the unwritten agreement that future research publications will be favourable to the donor company and its pharmaceutical products.

That's big business... he who pays the piper calls the tune.. and as for the universities, they're not going to bite the hands that feed them.

Since 2000, the Microsoft Corporation, via the Gates Foundation, has given $210 million to the University of Cambridge. That is the "largest corporate donation ever made to a British university".

To quote from the horse's mouth, "The Gates Cambridge Trust manages all aspects of the Gates Cambridge Scholarships programme, including the selection of scholars, scholars in residence, alumni relations and all financial and administrative matters."

Corporate bankrolling of university departments is bad news for academic freedom. The money serves to gag academic researchers who want to study the flaws in a corporate product. Do you think Microsoft would be happy to fund "off message" researchers?

asbokid

RussJK wrote: »

Was a really good read so appreciate that; I've been looking for something with a broad overview of rootkits and the efficacy of the detectors. Interesting that a whole slew of them stopped being developed in 2008, and I didn't realise AVZ was so far out of date.

Many of the companies which market rootkit detectors and other computer security products are supposedly located in former Soviet-bloc countries. That doesn't make sense. Those countries are not recognised as having any particular expertise in the broader field of software engineering, so why should they be producing all these experts in security engineering?

Hazarding a guess, the anti-virus companies are only nominally located in Eastern European countries for convenience. Their place of corporate domicile has been carefully chosen to avoid the sort of scrutiny - financial, legal, and technological - to which they would be subjected had they been located in the USA or UK.

However, I would bet that most of the in-house software engineering is actually done in the USA. That "engineering" could likely involve the lab development of malware, ostensibly to test their own anti-virus software.

Just as with the noxious microbiological organisms that are developed in a lab for "research purposes", there is a certain risk that lab-developed computer malware will escape and contaminate other hosts in the wild!

And so how fortunate it is that these companies can offer us instant antidotes for immediate download ($25 for the pro version)!

With rootkits, I wonder how much the recovery partitions can be trusted not to have been altered at some point. Hard to tell, because the people who suspect it never seem to wipe the MBR.

Standard security procedure is to imagine the worst case scenario after being "rooted". Once a hacker has escalated user privileges with a rootkit to gain root or "Administrator" access, he can theoretically change any aspect of the file system, including the integrity of the recovery partition. Those modifications, perhaps involving malicious patches or overwriting of critical system binaries, could be done on-the-fly, via a network backdoor to the machine.

Whether you should reinstall Windows after being rooted would depends on the value that you place on your computer data. But since the hacker could have installed a keystroke logger on your PC and since many of us bank online, using our PC keyboards to enter our banking passwords, I would want to wipe the entire hard disk after a rooting, and would reinstall the operating system from scratch from read-only DVD/CD media.

[Deleted User]

wow, talk about hijacking a thread for your own diatribe asbokid

Has anyone tried taking the hard disk out, putting it in a new box and booting up with a Linux CD? The files might actually still be there.. it could be that the FAT32 record is knackered by a virus. There are file recovery tools that could get stuff back.

RussJK

ringo_24601 wrote: »

wow, talk about hijacking a thread for your own diatribe asbokid Has anyone tried taking the hard disk out, putting it in a new box and booting up with a Linux CD? The files might actually still be there.. it could be that the FAT32 record is knackered by a virus. There are file recovery tools that could get stuff back.

Read the thread, and tell me if you think the OP is capable of taking out hard drives and repairing partition tables. I've enjoyed Asbo's diatribe, much better than yours.

1. The files are still there, because they were never deleted in the first place.
2. FAT32... really?
3. Why would you need to take the hard drive out if you were going to boot up with a live CD anyway??

It's as straightforward as clearing the malware with a quick scan from Malwarebytes, or a few extra steps if Malwarebytes can't run at first - afterwards she could then access the files unmolested. Potentially simple.