If you visit this site frequently, you’ll notice that I am a big fan of Kaspersky products. They do offer a few free products such as a web based scanner where you can scan your computer for virus but no removal online, a rescue disk that you can boot in to Linux and scan your hard drive for virus using the latest 2009 engine and AVPTool for you to run an on-demand scanning and removal of virus. As for their commercial product, they have Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 to protect your computer in real-time. They also have enterprise products which I’ve never tested so I can’t tell you much about it…
I just stumbled on another free tool offered by Kaspersky called AVZ developed by a Russian named Oleg Zaytsev. It started off as an independent anti-viral toolkit but Oleg went to Kaspersky, so now it is Kaspersky’s property. It is said that AVZ malware detection technology is built-in into AVPTool and the latest Kaspersky 2009 but actually AVZ has a lot more extra tools that is not included to the AVPTool and Kaspersky 2009.
AVZ is an anti-viral toolkit for system analysis and recovery. It’s main purpose is similar to Trojan Hunter or Ad-Aware which is meant to remove “malwares” but not “viruses”.
AVZ enables you to automatically or manually locate and remove spyware and AdWare programs and modules, rootkits and other software tools intended to conceal running processes, files or system data from the operating system, network and e-mail worms, various trojan applications including password stealers, malware downloaders, Trojan-Spies, and Backdoors (tools allowing remote control of a computer), trojan dialers, keyloggers and other means of tracking user’s activity.
The toolkit contains special feature that automatically repair the most typical registry modifications performed by malicious software. Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, Desktop settings, Policies, executable files startup parameters and others may be recovered using this tool. The repair operations are rarely performed by antiviruses, and quite often, after a piece of malware is deleted, the system remains corrupted.
AVZ also has a feature called AVZGuard which is used to block critical operations in the system. When AVZGuard is enabled, no application can launch, change the registry, kill a process, etc.
It is highly recommended to enable AVZGuard before system cleanup – it prevents malicious software from recovering its files, registry items, etc. There are times when it is nearly impossible to kill a malware process because whenever you kill it, the malware immediately spawns another new process. With the help of AVZGuard, the malware can no longer spawn a new process. If you need to run a cleaner tool when AVZGuard is enabled, you can do so by running the application as trusted from AVZ.
Unlike Kaspersky Rescue Disk and AVPTool that doesn’t have a update feature, AVZ has a built-in updater for us to easily update the malware definition database. There are many other useful utilities in AVZ, so do check it out. AVZ is another great addition to my list of virus removal tools in my USB flash drive. It is small, portable, really works and most importantly, FREE.
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