Free AVG Anti-Rootkit Program

[Harrie]

I was wondering if anyone has tried it and more importantly, what you think of it. I note it was released in April and I wasn't aware of it until today. That root stuff scares the daylights out of me!

[Billy_Black]

A tasty quote:

Removing

There is a body of opinion that holds this to be forbiddingly impractical. Even if the nature and composition of a rootkit is known, the time and effort of a system administrator with the necessary skills or experience would be better spent re-installing the operating system from scratch. Since drive imaging software makes the task of restoring a “clean” OS installation almost trivial, there is no good reason to try to dig a rootkit out directly. "I suppose traditional rootkits could be made to be as hard to remove as possible even when found, but I doubt this is much incentive for that, because the typical reaction of an experienced sysadmin on finding a rooted system is to save the data files, then reformat. This is so even if the rootkit is very well known and can be removed 100%."

[kaveman1969]

Originally Posted by Harrie

I was wondering if anyone has tried it and more importantly, what you think of it. I note it was released in April and I wasn't aware of it until today. That root stuff scares the daylights out of me!

I honestly don't know a lot about this subject, but I installed the AVG root kit scanner. Ran it once, it found nothing and I uninstalled it. If it had found something, I have no idea what I would have done. Probably would have ended up re-formatting. Sorry my post was pretty much useless, but I really don't know a lot about this.

[Harrie]

Thanks, Billy Black. That's the kind of discussion I was hoping for, as I really don't understand rootkits too well.

Thanks to you too, kaveman. Glad it found nothing on your machine.