The Spam Cryer

It pays to get a second opinion on Free Online Virus Scanners

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December 8th, 2008

You have renewed your anti-virus product faithfully, visit the patch site for your operating system regularly and practice what you believe is safe surfing habits, don’t notice your system running slow but it is still a great idea to get a second opinion.

Once in a while – say every 6 months – why not get a second opinion on if your computer is infected with something that your existing anti-virus product may have missed? It is also handy to have a list like this just in case you do notice something wrong with your computer (slowdown or unexpected pop-ups or error messages) and your existing up to date AV solution doesn’t set off the warning sirens.

Free Online Virus Scanners (in no particular order):

• http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml
• http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
• http://security.symantec.com
• http://us.mcafee.com/root/mfs/scan.asp?affid=56
• http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8
• http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/
• http://ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/scan.aspx
• http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan
• http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan
• http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

The above online scanners may not be able to remove something nasty – they do want you to upgrade to the full products after all – but they will give you an good idea if there is something nasty lurking on your computer. Where one will tell you your infected the next may be able to quarantine the infection – that is why there are so many links. Watch out for ‘market speak’ or some hype as most online scanners will report browser tracking cookies as an infection when in reality they are harmless text files that do not contain computer code.

Keep your computer infection free and not a member of the bot army.

- Shaun

Entry Filed under: Anti-Virus, Botnets