Description: Virustotal is a web service that provides on-demand scanning of your local files for worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. It allows you to upload any local file up to 10 megs in size and will perform a scan across 30+ different virus scanning engines (which include all of the leading heavy-hitter virus killer engines on the market).

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that most of us have fairly competent, updated virus-killer and antispyware software and firewalls that keep malware attacks at bay. But what if you want to open a file or run an .exe that is, by your estimation, of dubious origin? It is possible for you to manually override your antispyware and firewalls merely because you are accustomed to doing so when they intercept legitimate software and files and ask for your arbitration. Or, alternately, you might have a dangerous file that is simply not being recognized as such for whatever reason by the security software you are using.

This issue is of particular concern to me as I like to think that all the software featured on Freewaregenius is malware free, and the way I "check" for this is to simply try out the software and see how the security software I run responds, which is not really a guarantee that a file is malware free.

Enter Virustotal, a service that will scan any file that you upload to it using more than 30 virus detection engines with all the latest updates, making it far more likely that if the file in question is dubious that it will be recognized as such by a subset of these engines at the very least. Here are more notes on this service:

• Types of malware detected: can detect worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines. This does note include adware (I tested with a known adware program), but most (not all) of the engines will identify spyware.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.1.0.42

[Note: this review was written by my friend Mohammed Raei from Amman, Jordan; see his personal blog here - The Freewaregenius]

Description: AVG Anti-Rootkit Free is a program that scans your computer for rootkits and removes them.

Trojans, keyloggers, and worms can sometimes hide from conventional Anti-virus software inside "rootkits", rendering them useless in the face of such threats. This is where AVG Anti-Rootkit Free comes in. This is a very small and fast program that you should run before you do a virus scan, because virus killers do not detect or protect from rootkits. Once you ensure that your computer is free from rootkits your antivirus software can take it from there and prevent the installation of future rootkits.

I was able to run a standard scan in under 4 min and an in depth scan in about 14 min on my 5 years old Athlon XP 2000. I was not able to find any rootkits on my system, so I cannot comment too much on its efficacy. Suffice it to say that I now feel much more confident that my computer is free of rootkits than I was before.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 7.00.03.02

Description: Antivir Personal Edition Classic is a free, award-winning antivirus software. It provides scanning on demand as well as real-time protection against a wide array of malware including viruses, trojans, worms, and dialers. Antivir also offers excellent heuristic virus detection (i.e. its ability to identify yet-unknown threats). Note that Antivir does NOT offer real-time email virus scanning and detection.

This review was borne out of an email exchange with Freewaregenius reader Sinkhan, whose emails I quote below with permission.

Sinkhan: “I feel that there is some freeware that should definitely belong on your site. First of all, in your top ten picks, you list Grisoft’s AVG as your third favorite pick…. I would like to bring up AntiVir from Avira. This program is very near and dear to my heart. Although I’ve tried AVG and a close competitor that you may have heard of, Awil’s Avast!, Avira’s AntiVir Personal Edition Classic is a free program with an outstanding performance record.

At www.av-comparatives.org, an independant organization that researches anti-malware software, recent tests show that AntiVir has stellar detection rates, beating other commercial giants like Norton, McAffee, and quite substantially beating Avast! and AVG. The tests conducted were yes, done on the paid versions, but according to this part of Avira’s site, both the free and paid versions use the same engine for detecting viruses. The only features that the free version may lack is *fully* automatic updating (which however can be configured in the program to be automatic) and e-mail scanning (which I find rather unnecessary when using web-based email such as Yahoo!, G-Mail, or Hotmail).”

Me: “Thank you for your email. Indeed you’re right, there’s a lot of titles missing from my site. This is primarily a function of time, but I will say something about some of the titles you mentioned… I simply stayed away from [Antivir] because of the email scanning issue; for work, I have to use a POP3 account and I simply cannot have that vulnerability. But for anyone who only uses web services (Gmail, Hotmail) like yourself I agree it might well be the antivirus of choice.”
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Rating: 5 pick 

Version tested:  7.5.430

Description: AVG is a 100% free antivirus program that offers real time protection, on demand scanning, and email scanning. It also features automatic updates and a very small footprint that will not slow down your system. It does exactly what it promises and does it really well.

Although AVG is well known as a free antivirus program, I wanted to review it because the new version 7.5 (Oct 2006) seems to offer better protection than its predecessors

First, the good news:

• AVG is a complete antivirus solution that features dependable real time protection as well on-demand virus scanning
• AVG features auto updates, making it a good install-and-forget solution that you do not have to manually keep updating (some other ‘free’ antivirus programs will force you to keep doing this in order to incentivize you to buy the paid version). Read more »

Rating: 5 

This post last updated: Nov 7, 2006

Version: 1.1beta

Description: Comodo promises to be a complete install-and-forget antivirus solution that it 100% free.  This is beta software, so before you install and use this software please read the rest of this posting.

I have been using this software for a while now and I must say I am satisfied with it, so far it seems to be delivering what it promises. However, I will say that this software is in beta and this sometimes shows in the form of unexplained crashes and quirky behavior.

This program feautures (a) real time protection, (b) incoming/outgoing email scan, (c) automatic updates, (d) virus scans on demand, and (e) it also promises powerful heuristic detection of unknown viruses (i.e. a type of smart detection whereby an unknown virus is identified based on its behavior).

Comodo also does not seem to require a lot of resources to run. This is good, as my biggest peeve about many antivirus programs is that they can be so resource intensive as to literally slow up a fairly decent spec machine (Norton and McAfee spring to mind). Happily, from both what I read as well as well as my experience so far, this software does NOT seem to be a resouce hog.

But I do have a number of complaints about this program, all related to the fact that this software is still a beta release. Read more »