Methods for reducing the impact of malware during a booting sequence for an interrupt driven computing device are disclosed. One or more parameters associated with an interrupt vector table (IVT) are manipulated to force the computing device into a clean state following a system level portion of the booting sequence. In another embodiment, occurring prior to the loading of an operating system or a call to a non-returnable main( ) function, one or more unused interrupt vectors in an IVT are replaced. A function filter is implemented for one or more interrupt vectors in the IVT to disallow unnecessary interrupt functions from being executed. One or more required interrupt vector functions are replaced with one or more corresponding custom vector functions. One or more memory locations are wiped if the one or more memory locations do not hold at least a portion of the IVT and/or the interrupt vector functions.