Can MSAS be used as an on-demand scanner only?

[Guest]

For now, I prefer Prevx 1 to MSAS as an IPS (intrusion prevention system).
I won't bother going into the reasons. A weak point to Prevx is that is has
no means of performing an on-demand scan. With MSAS, Prevx, anti-virus
software, firewall, and whatever security you use, there is still avenues
for pests to get onto your system but remain dormant; i.e., their infected
file gets on your system but it is never called, accessed, or executed
(which should get caught by the IPS). Even an virally infected file with a
signature known to your anti-virus program's scanner could get onto your
hard drive; e.g., you disable your AV program during an install and the
install has the infected file, then you reenable your AV program but its
on-access scanner won't find the infected file but its on-demand scanner
will.

So I'd like to have the ability of MSAS with its signature database to use
as an on-demand scanner to hunt for dormant pests that will sit under the
radar of the on-demand scanners or IPS'es that rely on monitoring critical
areas, files, or are event driven. If I install MSAS and disable all its
monitors, will *nothing* of MSAS get loaded into memory? That is, is there
a way to install MSAS but have it not run but only use it to perform a
[scheduled] scan?

I had the Beta 1 back several months ago but it impacted performance on half
of my hosts so I uninstalled it. Regardless of Beta 2 being better, it and
Prevx would duplicate functionality and I only want MSAS to use as an
schedulable on-demand scanner.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

What I do on my 90 year old mother-in-laws machine is to remove the run key
registry entry. She finds any kind of unexpected prompt perplexing,
although she seems to be able to handle autoupdate OK. At any rate--I don't
want the thing talking to her, when I work on her machine remotely or in
person (she's 325 miles away)--I update it and do a scan.

 

[Guest]

What I do on my 90 year old mother-in-laws machine is to remove the run
key registry entry. She finds any kind of unexpected prompt perplexing,
although she seems to be able to handle autoupdate OK. At any rate--I
don't want the thing talking to her, when I work on her machine remotely
or in person (she's 325 miles away)--I update it and do a scan.

After configuring MSAS to *not* load on startup and not load its system
monitors, there was still the Run key that I had to disable using
msconfig.exe. I checked but there were no NT services defined (I thought
there used to be but perhaps not now with the monitors disabled in MSAS).

Thanks for the info.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

beta1 doesn't run as a service. Beta2 will--so there will be changes.

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