In this day and age of malware everywhere, it’s nice to occasionally use tools that look a little deeper at your system to see if something bad is hidden there. From Sophos, you can get the Sophos Anti-Rootkit. From F-Secure, you can get F-Secure Blacklight. From SysInternals, you can get Rootkit Revealer. All of these tools look for certain abnormalities that appear on your system when you have a rootkit. They won’t catch everything, but they do pick up a lot of stuff not hidden perfectly. Rootkit revealer is the tool Mark Russinovich was testing when he discovered and publicized the Sony DRM Rootkit. The Rootkit Revealer download page has good information on how to read the output to tell if you have a rootkit.
While we’re dealing with anti-malware tools, why not head over to Grisoft’s web site and pick up the free version of AVG anti-virus (free for home use, that is)? And since we’re on that thread, there’s AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, also free for private individual use. Or how about Avast Home Edition? Even if it weren’t already a great AV tool, it would be worth checking out for it’s name – anything pirate sounding deserves recognition.
In fact, there are so many free anti-malware and security tools out there, that you should just start checking more of them out. You should find something that works for you without being too intrusive. I recommend starting with Freebyte’s guide to anti-virus and anti-malware tools.
Thanks to Clif at Freewarewiki for pointing out the Sophos tool in the August 27th newsletter. This lead me to putting out some other recommendations for free anti-rootkit and anti-malware tools.
[tags]Free anti-rootkit tools, Free anti-virus tools, Free anti-malware tools[/tags]