I just recently bought a refurbished laptop. I have seen stories of refurbished phones being sold with spyware, trojans etc installed on them. My question is, what steps should I take (outside of running a virus protection scan) before i start using the laptop to ensure there is no spyware, trojans, keylogging, etc? And this second part question may be harder (or impossible) to answer, but is there a way to be absolutely certain it's a clean laptop?
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2Nuke it from orbit. – Jun 21 '18 at 16:05
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Who did you buy it from? The OEM or a third party? – Xander Jun 21 '18 at 16:16
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1I would follow the advice of this post: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/138606/help-my-home-pc-has-been-infected-by-a-virus-what-do-i-do-now/138617#138617 – CaffeineAddiction Jun 21 '18 at 16:18
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I got it from a third party, a "registered microsoft refurbisher"... not sure the credabilty of that but it sounds nice – DBroncos1558 Jun 21 '18 at 16:38
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Who is your adversary? – forest Jun 22 '18 at 02:35
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1No one in particular, but with technology one must always stay vigilant and cautious :) – DBroncos1558 Jun 27 '18 at 18:34
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Update the motherboard firmware, manually, and reinstall the OS, reformatting the drive. It's not a complete guarantee of security, but it will get rid of 99% of the likely threats.
By "refurbished", not just "used", do you mean a proper manufacturer refurbished item? In that case your risk is somewhat lower than with a plain used item, as the manufacturer won't deliberately install malware.
There is no way to be absolutely certain. Theoretically, if you were a high value target, someone could even install a hardware chip to spy on you.
Therac
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It's not considered used but refurbished, I got it from a third party, a "registered microsoft refurbisher" – DBroncos1558 Jun 21 '18 at 16:39
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@Therac got the basics - wipe and reinstall. Hardware malware is less common but exists, so reinstalling firmware isn't crazy but may not be necessary depending on your experience/risk acceptance level.
I'm mainly just adding one note: your question implies that "new is safe" but this isn't actually true either. There have been cases of new hardware/systems coming with malware pre-installed too! Example:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-on-new-hard-drives/
Conor Mancone
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