After a sudden rise in malware attacks, phishing and malicious websites, people have become wiser and have started to install at least a free antivirus product on their computers. Credit should also be given to Microsoft who has started to push Microsoft Security Essentials for those Windows users who have not installed any antivirus. But there are still people out there who are adamant at not installing any antivirus. Its people like these who often get infected. If one of your friends has got malware infection too, then you can use a portable antivirus tool like Comodo Security Essentials.
Named similar to Microsoft’s Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), Comodo Security Essentials (CSE) is a powerful anti-malware tool that can help you detect and remove viruses and malware from an infected Windows computer. It scans various areas of your PC like memory, registry, files, bootsectors etc. and reports if it finds any malware. It supports both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.
You can download Comodo Security Essentials from the Comodo website. Their website would automatically detect whether you have 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Windows and shows the relevant link, but you can manually choose the 32-bit or 64-bit download too. The download for 32-bit edition of Windows is around 24 megabytes. It is portable so you do not have to install anything. Just extract the files from the downloaded archive and run CCE.exe. It would give you an option to run the Smart Scan, Full Scan or Custom Scan.
The Smart Scan scans only the key areas of your system where the malware loves to hide often. The Full Scan scans your entire system including all the hard disks and attached removable media. The Custom Scan allows you to choose which areas of your system you would like to scan. You can choose from memory, hidden registry objects, services, critical area, boot sector, hidden files/folders etc.
After you have clicked the Scan button it would prepare for the scan which includes downloading some files from the internet. Then the scanning would start which might take some time to finish. The exact time taken for the scanning depends on how large your hard disks are and how many malware it detects. In the end, it would show a summary of how many objects were scanned and how many threats were detected.
At this point, you can click on the Next button to view a report of all the detected malware. The report shows a list of all the threats found. You can see the full file/registry path, risk level and default action (which is “Clean”) or operation to be performed on them. You can now click on the Apply button and Comodo Security Essentials would start to remove the malware. Some of the malware require the computer to be restarted, so if needed it would ask you to restart the computer.
Comodo Security Essentials also includes two advanced tools that might be helpful if you are dealing with an infected computer – Autorun Analyzer and KillSwitch. Both of these tools are meant for advanced users. The Autorun Analyzer tool lets you enable or disable the programs running at Windows startup. It can scan auto-running programs under as many as seventeen categories. The interesting thing is that you can automatically disable all unsafe entries by selecting Disable All Unsafe Entries from the menubar.
The Comodo KillSwitch tool is a very advanced tool that lets you view all the running programs, services and processes and kill them (stop them) as desired. It shows a safety rating for all the running processes so that you can know which of them are safe and which are unsafe. In addition, it also features a TCP network analyzer that displays all the application connecting to the internet. Just like Autoruns Analyzer, you can select to kill or suspend all unsafe processes by selecting Kill all unsafe processes or Suspend all unsafe processes from the menubar.
Comodo Security Essentials is a very nice portable malware scanner and removal tool. Though it is not a full antivirus product and does not have a real time scanner element, yet it can be run alongside your existing malware. It can be used to get rid of malware from an infected PC, get a second opinion on any suspicious files or just for regularly checking your system for malware infections.
You can download and install Comodo Security Essentials from http://www.comodo.com/business-security/network-protection/cleaning_essentials.php.