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by danieljscott 3677 days ago
Wiping the hard drive is pretty good, but I wouldn't even trust that. It's possible to hide malicious code in many other places which would survive a wipe of the HDD. I've heard of malware which can be installed into the graphics card firmware, or the BIOS, and I imagine that anywhere else which can be written to is a possible location to hide.

Personally, I'd chuck the computer away and buy a new one, but I'm paranoid.

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Back in Win XP days, I caught a nasty virus that installed itself in the master boot record of the hard drive. I formatted the partition, reinstalled everything, and the damn thing kept coming back. Paranoia made me switch to Linux for a while after that.
Is it possible that an OS could be the one loading Linux, and thus would effect your Linux instance?

edit: I used to get really paranoid after using Windows for an extended period of time. Still do sometimes, but learned to live with it. I feel like I have no control over what services are listening on 0.0.0.0, the firewall is completely unusable compared to iptables.