As in my other post - is this something I want to install to look
for 'bots?
This is certainly not my specialty, but...
I don't know that these malicious software removal tools are
especially designed to look for bots, but otoh, are you only concerned
about bots, or other malware too. Since MS went to the trouble to
write them, it seems like they would be worth using.
But aiui, each of these programs only runs once, the next time you
boot windows, so "install" doesn't seem like quite the right word.
Seems to me like any decent anti virus sb doing this already.
Just guessing, it's called a removal tool, so it's meant for malware
that has installed itself already. And AIUI, it runs before Windows
starts, when any file can be deleted.
As to assuming Avast or any other software will catch every virus,
don't AV companies depend on people P sending in viruses when they
find them on their computer? And then the AV company has to
distinguish the virus from the rest of the file it is occupying. It
has to find a unique string for the AV program to check for, has to
test that this works in practice, has to make this available as an
update to virus defs, and then it has to be dl'd by every user. Now
how can all that happen in less time than it takes you to get the same
virus that P got in the first place? Indeed some people probably have
the virus even before the first step above, before anyone has sent a
sample to an AV company.
Isn't there bound to be more than one person infected with a virus
before any AV company has protection against it?
In my ex-gf's case, afaict she got a virus last Thursday evening, when
she went to
www.letmewatchthis.com , I think the name is, and tried to
dl a tv show, something she has done before with no problem, at the
same website. Instead she got a screen that said she needed a virus
check, and she was suspicious, but not suspicious enough, and she
started it, but stopped it soon after. After that pretty much nothing
in her computer worked.
So the next evening we booted with the newest version of BitDefender
and ran that, and then she could for some reason run the computer but
not use her web browsers, so we updated AVG and ran it, and this time
it found and removed a trojan (and a registry reference to it), even
though it didn't find the virus the previous day.
Doesn't that likely mean that the def for that virus was in the last
definition update we did? One day after she got the virus. Is there
any reason that couldn't be the case?
Her virus may or may not have been fully removed by AVG, and for sure
its removal didn't undo every change it had made.
AIUI, MS doesn't write a malware removal tool for every virus, only a
small fraction of them. I'm guessing it's only those that are
especially hard to remove, or especially destructive, or something.
Am I right about that?
I always use the ones they send me.
