Good free trustworthy downloadable bootable rootkit/virus scanner and possibly repair program?

[QuixoticOne]

My family member is visiting and possibly has a virus on an XP laptop.
He's already recently installed a new copy of Avast and Comodo firewall/anti-spyware.
These don't appear to be detecting a problem if I'm understanding his reports properly; they were potentially installed after infection.

Hence I think it is possible that the virus / malware / spyware is either not detectable in the databases of those products, or is hidden in a rootkit / whatever such that it is not being found.

What're the best available free tools I can boot from CD to do a good scan / clean up of this system?

Clearly I could pay for commercial offerings or research the various free ones, or swap the hard disc to another system and use a known clean system to scan the questionable hard disc, but I'm just looking for other easier options.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Crono]

You should run a boot time scan using Avira and use 4 or 5 different antivirus programs afterward. Use Bitdefender's free online scan as one of them. There are a couple of freeware anti-rootkit programs you can run, also (use Google, can't recall ATM). Also run SuperAntiSpyware, AdAware and Spybot after everything else.

The key is to run multiple scans from different providers of security software. If you haven't found the problem after all of this, it may not be a virus or piece of malware at all. Then you have to nuke the drive. It's the only way to be sure.

 

[MadAmos]

The online scanners at kaspersky and trendmicro are two of the better ones I have also heard good things about f-secure but AIR it just uses the kaspersky engine. there is also blacklight which is a rootkit scanner also from f-secure that used to be available free for 30 days.
You could also try hijackthis and upload the log to here and see if there is anything obvious.


Amos

 

[Schadenfroh]

Ultimate Boot CD For Windows

 

[QuixoticOne]

Thanks all I'll give those all a try.
Wow I hate windows.

 

[compman25]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
Thanks all I'll give those all a try.
Wow I hate windows.

Sounds more like you should hate your family member.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Yes, they didn't admin their PC properly and got a virus, but it is too easy to get a virus "by default" under windows given all the vulnerabilities that can be exploited just by visiting a web page at a nominally trustworthy site (e.g. myspace, yahoo, cnn, whatever).

It is also architecturally much much much harder to backup / restore / repair / reinstall (non-destructively to programs/data) than it should be, or, say, UNIX is.

I'm not sure it is even all that feasible for a dial up networking user to keep up (in time) with a lot of the multi-megabyte critical updates that occur every few weeks without just the long download time creating an unreasonable vulnerability from some of the more severe zero-day type problems that have been common in, say, the flash / pdf / image handling / email / browser systems.

Originally posted by: compman25

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
Thanks all I'll give those all a try.
Wow I hate windows.

Sounds more like you should hate your family member.