Anti-Virus Software

There are a number of companies that produce anti-virus software. This is not intended to be a complete list of anti-virus companies; but, it is a good starting place.

Anti-Virus Software Companies

(Alphabetical order... position in the list does not indicate any recommendation of one over another.)

• ALWIL Software avast! (Free for personal home use)
• AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic (Free)
• AVG Professional
• Command Antivirus
• eTrust EZ Armor Suite
• F-Secure Anti-Virus
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus
• McAfee VirusScan
• MIMESweeper (mail firewall)
• Norman Virus Control
• Norton AntiVirus
• Panda Antivirus
• Sophos Sweep
• Trend PC-cillin

Free Internet Scanning

If you search on "internet virus scanning" a number of sites pop up. Many seem to link back to the Trend HouseCall service so you might as well go there first (but there are others)...

• Trend HouseCall
• WindowSecurity.com Trojan Scan
• Virustotal (a service that uses multiple scanners on an uploaded file)

Free Internet Scanning of Individual Files

If you are just suspicious of a single file then submit that file to one of these sites and see what the various anti-virus scanners say about it. This is also a good idea if you develop software. False alarms by scanners are not unknown and sometimes happen. It would be good to know if some scanner triggers on your file(s) before distributing them and then having to fight off the "Your software has a virus" support mails.

• http://virusscan.jotti.org/
• http://virustotal.com/

DisasterRecovery

And, should you catch a virus and it activates with a really nasty payload that effectively erases your hard disk (or, for that matter, you disk fails for any reason) there are companies that will attempt to recover your data if it is important and you have not followed our recommendation to back up frequently. These procedures are labor intensive so you should expect to pay accordingly. Some of these sites are listed here in no particular order.

• Ontrack Data Recovery, Inc.
• DataRescue
• Data Recovery Services, Inc.
• Drivesavers
• IntelliRecovery
• Dataleach Data Recovery Labs
• datapol (Multiple tools including NTFS4DOS, free for personal use)
• Salvage Hard Drive Data Recovery Services
• Stellar Information Systems Ltd
• TestDisk (Recover lost partitions)
• PhotoRec (Recover a large number of different file format lost files)