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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/
A portable version of ClamWin may do the trick.
http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/118/89/
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
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."
I work in a similar environment, and although I can't recommend a virus program, I can suggest ways to prevent it. It sounds like the company is creating an embedded device, but is not using an embedded operating system. Microsoft Windows embedded forbids writes to the C: drive when you enable EWF or FBWF. EWF gives you a memory overlay so software *can* write to C:, but if you get infected, you just reboot the machine. Alternatively, a good Micro-ATX BIOS will support making the drives read-only.
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.