Trojan Remover 6.8 is a comprehensive Trojan antivirus that scans the system for Trojans, spyware and adware.  In recent months, the program has become more and more popular and has amassed almost 800,000 downloads on Softpedia.  It is easy to see why the program has earned so many accolades; Trojan remover excels at extremely fast scanning and maintaining a large and accurate database.  Surprisingly, all of this functionality is contained within a program that uses no more than 10 megabytes. 

    The first feature that really intrigued me with Trojan Remover is its extremely in depth Trojan and virus scanning.  The scan available on the main page completes in a hasty 11 seconds flat.  However, although the scan is extremely fast, the software checks 26 different parts of Windows.  In fact, I cannot actually add a critical area to the list which is very impressive.  The scanner, among several things, can scan for malicious .dlls, suspicious VxD entries (rouge device drivers aka keyloggers), winlogin modifications, and an advanced heuristic scan etc.  All of this virus scanning is done with over 7500 definitions and from what I can tell daily updates.  The next scanning option is the “Fast Scan”.  The “Fast Scan” can be scheduled to scan on every system boot.  The “Fast Scan” will utilize the above location scan with scanning of critical areas such as the Windows and System32 folders.  Ironically, the “Fast Scan” is much slower than the main scan and will actually take about 4 minutes to complete.  However, 4 minutes is not anything to worry about and eclipses most free antivirus software's scanning ability.  Trojan Remover 6.8 also has a custom scan option where a user can select the desired location for a scan.

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     The Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool is a completely freeware antivirus.  This news may come to one’s surprise because Kaspersky normally charges at least $29.99 for a one-year subscription.  The entire antivirus engine is contained in one executable file.  New files are released on almost a daily basis that contain exactly the same definitions files as the full version.  In addition, the removal tool includes a self-defense feature that prevents the application scanning from being interrupted. Read More...

    Many users know all too well, what happened to Google during January.  Hackers were able to install a program called a keylogger onto internal systems and then record passwords etc.  to further infiltrate the corporate systems and steal information.  This type of attack is now becoming one of the most common hacker methods.  I now see Trojans with keyloggers installed almost 50% of the time on various users’ virus detection results.  This is because viruses and Trojans are becoming increasingly financially motivated to steal credit card numbers, social security numbers, and passwords.  The problem however, is that keyloggers can be very difficult to detect by standard free antivirus.  In addition, keyloggers are very simple pieces of software that can be recoded in hours thwarting new antivirus definitions.  Therefore, a personal computer cannot be considered completely safe with just free antivirus and antispyware. Read More...

    Spyware Terminator is one of the few completely free full featured antispyware software.   The company doesn’t even have a “full version” for purchase.  The software boasts real time protection, detection of over 500,000 items with daily database updates, automatic update capability, and even integration with ClamWin free antivirus.  As one can see, the software is truly full featured compared to other “free antispyware” which often contain partially functional real-time shields etc.  In our tests, Spyware Terminator performed excellent at detecting and mitigating spyware and malware threats.

Features:

    Since Spyware Terminator has such a comprehensive feature set for a freeware antivirus, I wanted to quickly review the functionality.

    Real-Time Protection. Spyware Terminator includes a very comprehensive real-time protection system.  The system includes several shields including a startup, service and driver, web browser add-ons, file extensions, Winsock, ie settings, system ini, and host shield.   All of these shields rely on Spyware Terminators extensive classification database that classifies each change to the latter areas as safe, unknown, or a solid threat.  In our tests, we were immediately prompted when installing a so called rouge add-on to Firefox (adware toolbar for free online games).  
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   SuperAntispyware is a free antispyware and antivirus program that boast over 20 million users and 1,000,000 threat signatures.  SuperAntispyware has also garnered a lot of interest from review sites frequently being awarded high ratings and accolades for its performance.  In our tests, these awards had a lot of validity to them as SuperAntispyware exceeded our expectations.  It detected antispyware on the test computer in which over 30 different antivirus and antispyware full system scans had been run.  SuperAntispyware also offers several innovative features and excellent locked process removal.

Virus/Spyware Detection and Removal:

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