During these holidays season when everyone is busy celebrating and enjoying the time with their friends and family members, the crooked cyber criminals are busy finding new ways to infect your computer systems with new and nefarious rootkits and malware with the sole intent of stealing your financial information like credit cards, debit cards, banking information etc. What is more, some of these malware are of the ransomware variant types which demand you a ransom in exchange of the password to decrypt the documents that the malware has encrypted secretly. This is why you should always keep the operating system and the web browser up-to-date, keep a good antivirus installed and refrain from visiting suspicious websites.
Even after a good antivirus software installed on your system, you can check your system with special tools like SanityCheck to see if some suspicious files have found a way into your PC. SanityCheck offers two modes – basic mode and the expert mode. The basic mode is for everyone and generates a simple report that you can go through. The expert mode allows you to further analyze the system yourself through a set of tools.
When you launch SanityCheck for the very first time, it asks you to change certain registry entries and reboot your PC for making detection of rootkits easier. Whether you choose to do so depends on you, but for beginners it is a good idea to follow the advice and click on the “Yes” button.
In the main window of SanityCheck, you have to click on the Analyze button for it to go through various areas of your system and analyze all these items. In general, it checks the device drivers, devices, processes, threads, files, kernel object types and kernel routines for any malicious presence.
The scanning may take a few minutes for completion. After the scanning is complete, you are shown a report about the analysis. The report is displayed in the SanityCheck window itself. You have to scroll down the report a little to find the “Analysis” section in the report.
If you think that you are an advanced user, then you can pull the menu and select View → Expert Mode to access the expert mode. In this mode, various analyzed files are displayed in various different tabs, e.g., drivers, devices, processes, files, object types and so on.
Conclusion: SanityCheck can detect the presence of rootkits and malware by thoroughly scanning your system for any suspicious files, irregular behavior, and other threats that could indicate presence of rootkits or malware.
You can download SanityCheck from http://www.resplendence.com/sanity.