Links To Recovery Tools

[publicenemynumerouno]

When I find something that works these days I really try to promote hell out of it. It's difficult, maybe even possible, to buy anything from a really large, well known company, that works or has any support.

The folks who write viruses, malware and the rest seem to focus on creating problems that any one particular application will not fix or detect. In the last week I worked with four different commercial virus protection programs of which exactly none detected or protected against everything. The two that fared the best were Kaspersky and Superantispyware.

In June of this year I began using McAfee's home use security suite. Last week it began crashing like clockwork but did it in a way that was insidious. The realtime protection would fail without any notice, followed anywhere from twenty minutes to four hours and fifteen minutes by a warning that the remainder of their modules had tanked. The best I can tell they have discovered a bug, which they are fixing now on their Enterprise version, which is probably using the crap out of their bandwidth, but they refuse to admit that there is actually a problem with the version folks use at home and pay as much as a hundred bucks to get. If it weren't for the fact that my employer provided it to me for free I probably never would have tried them again.

Right now the two anti-virus/malware products that I rank absoloutely dead last are Norton, because it's slow and good anti-virus software cannot be slow, and McAfee because they know they have a problem, they just don't want to do anything about it until the enterprise versions are all patched off, then they'll turn to the consumers.


So......here are some tools to look for -

This is the BEST for tinkering on any hard drive that has problems. It does not take a year to learn, works the way it's supposed to and helps you get access to the things you want. If Mercedes had built cars like these guys write code they have never lost money messing with Chrysler.

http://www.pcinspector.de

After trying to clean crap off with McAfee, which has absolutely no technical support for consumer software (you're better off getting AVG Free), I settled on Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool and Superantispyware. Not only do they play well together, they complement. If you keep an eye on it when you run it they have a sale from time to time, ten bucks for a full registered version. While it does not have all the bells and whistles of the really high end shit, it makes up for it by actually doing what it says it does. Amazing, huh?

http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html

This is THE anti-root kit removal tool and it's FREE! Yes, FREE. And it fucking works. Want to kill a file and tired of having Malwarebytes tell you it can't do it? Note that I"m not down on Malwarebytes, it's pretty good stuff, but it has it's limits and killing files is one of them. GMER not only detects 95 percent of every rootkit you're ever going to see, it will kill files like there is no tomorrow. While I haven't had to work on a rootkit since summer, I did have to kill a trojan and this was the tool I used.

http://www.gmer.net/

Another free tool but, can be dangerous if you aren't taking your time and being cautious. This program will delete dead registry entries and more or less speed things up a bit on your computer. It has a lot of functions for removing trash from your hard drive without having to spend four hours reading bullshit from MIcrosoft. If you don't know what you're doing take some time to read their forum and their documentation. If you aren't sure, post a question to their forum and they seem to answer very quickly. And no, I don't post there. I'm pretty confident about working on these things after this long.

http://www.ccleaner.com/