Alureon.A behavior

[Mike W]

Greetings. I connected an old IDE hard drive via my trusty USB to IDE/SATA cable and MSSE immediately notified that Alureon.A was found at \device\harddisk1\dr8 and \device\harddisk1\dr8\(MBR). So I let MSSE clean what it had found, it prompted me to reboot. Then Malwarebytes free version would not update got the 12007 winhttpsendrequest error. In fact I apparently had no internet connectivity via dns names. I did the tried and true netsh interface ip reset and cleared that problem, but I sure would like to (1) understand what just happened and (2) is there some sort of reasonable write blocker technology that would keep stuff from jumping onto the pc from external drives to be scanned?

Also - I keep recent ghost backups, so I can reimage fairly easily. But is there an easier way to recover from exposure to rootkits such as this? Thanks much in advance. - Mike W.