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Stand-Alone Antivirus Software?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that repairs specialty devices that have an embedded Mini-ATX motherboard without a CD-ROM drive and run Windows XP Home. And while the USB flash drives we insert into them have a physical write-protect tab, we still encounter a (rather annoying) display dialog from malware/viruses to remove the write-protect so the malware can infect the flash drive. We don't remove the write-protect, obviously, but would like to offer our customers the option of removing the malware/virus without having to install any software. We would rather not install/uninstall antivirus software even for one-time use, due to various licensing issues, nor do we want to connect to the Internet to use web-based online scanners. Is there any stand-alone anti-virus/anti-malware software for Windows that can be run directly from the write-protected flash drive itself?"
ClamWin, Dr. Web CureIt: etc http://thepcsecurity.com/ultimate-list-of-portable-antiviruses-for-your-usb/
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
There are several AV products that can be slipstreamed into it, and there are instructions on installing the Ultimate Boot CD onto a thumbdrive, which is handy for keeping AV signatures up to date.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Yes it does, but you have to turn on the removal feature first (defaults to report-only). SuperAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes also have portable versions (I think MalwareBytes' portable version may be an unsupported mod, though.)
http://www.superantispyware.com/portablescanner.html I have had good luck with this. Hope you do too.
I've found the "Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP" can be very helpful at locking down exactly what can be changed on an XP build... including allowing changes, but wiping them after a reboot.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/SharedToolkitFS.mspx
It's now called "Windows SteadyState 2.5"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d077a52d-93e9-4b02-bd95-9d770ccdb431&displaylang=en
Back in the BBS days, from MacAffee, you could download SCAN.EXE and CLEAN.EXE and run them on DOS.
And - you still can!
Go to their website and find the command line scanner for win32. It claims to be a trial version, but with no install routine and being a command line program, that doesn't mean much. It uses the same .DAT files that you download for any other VirusScan program.
I get a huge chuckle when I run it, because it's exactly the same way it was in 1988 and that's the way it oughta be. all this other crap is fer lamos :-)
Other programs will catch 98-99%. Clamwin is lucky to catch 30.