Following a trail of utilities

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SHORTS By TB Capen It’s always a bit surprising how researching one topic can lead you to others. In this case, it started with an AskWoody Lounge pos
[See the full post at: Following a trail of utilities]

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SueW, lmacri

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[erbkaiser]

For years now I’ve been using Unchecky on my Windows PCs. This little program is reallygood at catching every PUP I’ve thrown at it. It’s an install and forget type program: it just sits in the systray doing its job and only pops up when it’s needed.

It doesn’t get many updates – in fact, the last update was in 2018 – but it still works.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by erbkaiser.

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Related to your article are there still online sites that’ll virus check your *whole*system*.

Back in my win7 days, there used to be one at symantec and panda.  Dunno which ones are available these days, but it’d be nice to know.  what’s nice about the online versions is that there used to be several {so as with virustotal you could get several “opinions} and also they used “up to the second” engines.

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There are on/offline checkers from several AV vendors. Panda and Kaspersky spring to mind.

Check your favourite AV vendor for one.

cheers, Paul

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[lmacri]

berniec wrote:

Related to your article are there still online sites that’ll virus check your *whole*system*. ..what’s nice about the online versions is that there used to be several {so as with virustotal you could get several “opinions} and also they used “up to the second” engines.

Hi berniec:

As Paul T noted, there are various online virus scanners that can detect and remove malware from infected computers [for example, see the 06-Oct-2020 MalwareFox article 5 Best Online Virus Scanners for reviews of the F-Secure Online Scanner and the ESET Online Scanner (now one free scan only)] but I don’t know of any online scanner that will scan your entire system with multiple scan engines at the same time. If you simply need a reputable on demand “second opinion” scanner to look for PUPs or malware that might have been missed by your main antivirus I’d suggest installing Malwarebytes Free. For Win 7 and higher Malwarebytes Free v4.x is available at https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/; for Win XP and Vista the legacy Malwarebytes Free v3.5.1 is available at https://downloads.malwarebytes.com/file/mb3_legacy.

I don’t know if this meets your needs, but Microsoft Sysinternal’s free Process Explorer v16.x utility is now integrated with VirusTotal.com. If you go to Options | Virus Total and enable the “Check VirusTotal.com” option you can see the VirusTotal score for every process running on your computer (e.g., where 0/75 means 0 of 75 virus scan engines consider the executable to be suspicious / malicious). Process Explorer can identify malicious processes loaded into memory and running on your system, but it isn’t a malware scanner, so a program like Malwarebytes Free is much better if you want to perform a full system scan of your entire system to look for potential threats missed by your antivirus (e.g., self-extracting .exe software installers bundled with PUPs or malware) before they are launched.

If you’d like to try Process Explorer it’s a portable application (i.e., no installation required) – just download the ProcessExplorer.zip from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer, save to any location (including a USB thumb drive), unzip the file, and run the appropriate 32-bit or 64-bit executable that matches your system. On my 64-bit Win 10 machine I normally right-click the 64-bit executable (procexp64.exe) and choose Run as Administrator.
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1139 * Windows Defender v4.18.2010.7 * Malwarebytes Free v4.2.3.96-1.0.1104 * Process Explorer v16.32

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by lmacri.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by lmacri.

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[lmacri]

Further to the article author TB Capen’s comment about Piriform’s Speccy that “Surprisingly, the SMART status section for my solid-state drive was marked as ‘not supported.’“, this now seems to be a common problem for Speccy with many modern SSDs.

My 22-Apr-2020 post in the Speccy forum thread No SSD NVM Info shows how Speccy reports “S.M.A.R.T. not supported” for my Toshiba KBG40ZNS256G 256 GB NVMe SSD while CrystalDiskInfo correctly displays the S.M.A.R.T. attributes. I’ve used Speccy for many years but I suspect part of the problem is that the current Speccy v1.32.740 (released 21-May-2018) hasn’t been updated for over two years. Avast / Piriform employee Dave CCleaner posted <here> on 24-Jun-2019 that an update for Speccy was planned for late 2019 but that promised update is still pending.
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Dell Inspiron 15 5584 * 64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1139 * Toshiba KBG40ZNS256G 256GB NVMe SSD * Speccy Portable v1.32.740 * CrystalDiskInfo (Standard edition) Portable v8.8.9

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by lmacri. Reason: Edited link to open in new tab

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Good to hear that there are still online full-scanners.  Alas, I don’t have a favorite [Windows Defender is good enough for me].   Any recommendations?

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Already mentioned in my post above.

cheers, Paul

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For a “second opinion” scan,  I tend toward using either Trend’s HouseCall or ClamWin.

HouseCall is an online scanner, although you have to download a tool that runs as a portable app.  I have a portable apps version (downloaded from portableapps.com) of ClamWin.  For that one, there is a downloaded signatures file that needs to be updated before running.

I have a friend that is suspicious of any kind of online scanners, because of potential privacy issues, although I think the only practical way of them working is uploading hash totals and not files. For ClamWin, if you have an updated signature file, that’s one that can be run totally disconnected.  I’ve never checked, but it might be slightly faster, because the processing is entirely local.

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Thanks for all the advice.  I’m still not quite convinced that relying on the built-in machinery in win10 isn’t adequate, but I’ll file away the whole-system scan links and try a few to see if their find anything that Defender hasn’t

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