OSHI Unhooker is an freeware tool to detect and remove the hooks in your system. A hook is a computer programming technique to replace the memory contents of a program function to execute your own commands or functions. For example, you can hook the save function of Notepad so that when someone tries to save in Notepad, your own program runs instead of saving the file. This technique is also used by malware to hook programs in Windows and run malicious tasks. OSHI Unhooker scans your system for all the possible hooks and offers you a convenient way to unhook them.
You can download OSHI Unhooker from their website. The download is around 5 megabytes. It is a portable application which means that you do not have to install anything on your system. Just download and run Unhooker.exe. The program offers a very nice looking user interface. In the beginning, you have to accept their license agreement. OSHI Unhooker is very simple to use – there are no options to choose. To start the scanning just click/tap on the big play button in the center of the window.
It would scan all the processes running on your system and check if their memory contents match with the original contents of the respective program files on your hard disk. If their is a mismatch, then is possible that the program or one of its dependencies loaded in system memory has been hooked. Such processes are displayed in a list after the scan is over.
You can save the report by clicking on the Save Report button and send this report to a security expert who can futher advise you on what steps should be taken. But if you know what you are doing, then you can select the processes that you find suspicious and click on the Clean button. The selected system resources shall be unhooked in a few seconds.
It is worth mentioning that not all hooks are malicious in nature. For example, sometimes legitimate programs use hooks to prevent Windows close it down accidentally. So you should be careful when trying to clear up hooks. Before you clean the selected hooks, make sure that you have saved all the work because it may cause some programs to close down unexpectedly.
OSHI Unhooker is a great tool for detecting and removing hooks in Windows. This can be very effective against 0-day malware that is still not being detected by your antivirus. OSHI Unhooker is certainly not for the average PC users. If you are an inexperienced user when it comes to Windows security, then you should consult a security advisor before trying to clean up hooks.
You can download OSHI Unhooker from http://www.oshiunhooker.com/.