A Capable New Online Malware Scanner by a-squared
a-squared, a respected anti-malware company, has created a new online malware scanner. This scanner is available for no cost. Several different depths of scanning are available. And this is not one of those phony “free” online scanners that find all kinds of weird stuff and then demand money to remove it all. The a-squared scanner offers a “quarantine” option, and after objects are quarantined, they may be deleted or restored. The online scanner can be found here: http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/ax/
a-squared also has a no cost desktop version of the malware scanner. It must be updated manually. It is available for download here: a-squared free version
a-squared also has a desktop version that sells for about $39 (for the first year subscription, with subsequent years at half price). The advantage of the desktop version is that it provides full time active protection, including automatic updates, while the online scanner does not.
mini-review:
In out first test of the online scanner, it found a number of fragments of previous malware infections, as well as a number of tracking cookies, but it locked up when it tried to scan a ZoneAlarm update file. We don’t know yet if it was Zone Alarm that blocked the scan from completing, or if a-squared locked up.
By the way, we were able to scan, and quarantine the results, as long as we did not allow the scan to continue until it encountered the ZoneAlarm file. We are using the full ZoneAlarm Security Suite, and further testing will be required to see if this also happens with only the ZoneAlarm firewall installed. We suspect this is only a temporary conflict with ZoneAlarm. We will continue testing.
