Mitigating Malicious Code

ABSTRACT Mitigation of malicious code is increasingly complicated by multi-staged and mutli-variant attacks taking place daily on the Internet today. It is now common for computers to be infected for long periods of time, with malicious browser help objects, rootkits, and similar stealth codes. Identification and removal from a computer can be especially difficult. In some cases, the only reasonable effort may be to completely wipe and reinstall an image of the system, known to be free of malicious code. Manual mitigation of malicious code is a sophisticated process of threat identification, research, mitigation, and monitoring to properly remove all threat components related to an attack.