Web Browser Wednesday
We love getting our hands on some free software, and when it comes to antivirus protection there are pretty good scanners available at no cost all through your browser. Most of them do take advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX technology, and for that reason you must be using IE. Aside from that these scanners look wimpy on the exterior, but boy can they can dig up some dirty viruses on your computer.
We grabbed six of our favorite free online virus scanners and listed them out below with the best ones first. They’re not ranked by anything technical like virus detection rate, we just did it by how easy it was to setup and how good their reputation is for their desktop counterparts.
–NOD32–
- Website: ESET Online Scanner
- Browser Requirements: Internet Explorer 5 or better
- Operating System Requirements: Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista
- Notes: Fast setup/scanning, and the interface looks really nice. It also includes an option to remove “unwanted applications” such as malware.
- Screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
–Kaspersky–
- Website: Kaspersky Online Scanner
- Browser Requirements: Internet Explorer 6 or better
- Operating System Requirements: N/A
- Notes: The initial time to get it setup was quite lengthy. It had to download 16MB of virus definitions which took 15 minutes by itself. What is nice though is that you can select a specific location/file to scan.
- Screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
–Trend Micro–
- Website: Trend Micro HouseCall
- Browser Requirements: Internet Explorer 6 or better; Firefox 2 or better
- Operating System Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista; Mac OS X
- Notes: This is an interesting alternative since you download and run a small program that will setup your browser for scanning. I’m guessing this is necessary since it works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can also specify an area on your computer to scan.
- Screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
–BitDefender–
- Website: BitDefender Online Scanner
- Browser Requirements: Internet Explorer
- Operating System Requirements: N/A
- Notes: This has an option to scan only certain areas on your computer, and the virus signature downloads went pretty quick.
- Screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
–Panda–
- Website: Panda ActiveScan
- Browser Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
- Operating System Requirements: Internet Explorer 5 or better
- Notes: This wouldn’t even let us through to scan our Vista machine since it’s not supported so we weren’t able to test it out. However, Panda is well known for providing great antivirus protection.
- Screenshot: N/A
–Norton–
- Website: Symantec Virus detection
- Browser Requirements: Internet Explorer 5 or better
- Operating System Requirements: N/A
- Notes: Setup was pretty fast, but it lacks any configurability.
- Screenshot (Click to Enlarge):
This is just one of the hundreds of CyberNotes we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our CyberNotes category, or by subscribing to our CyberNotes feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!
Tags: CyberNotes, Web Sites, Antivirus
Related Posts:
- Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
- Online Anti-Virus Solution From Symantec
- Scan a File for Viruses
- CyberNotes: New Computer Viruses - Beware!
- JS/SNZ.A Virus is False Positive
@Ryan:
I can see most of the scanners work with MS Internet Explorer and only one with Firefox. Neither Opera nor Safari are supported. Does it mean there are more security problems with IE than with other popular browsers?
Regards,
Omar.-
@epiac1216
Don’t think so….
From one point of view you could say that they target IE because it’s is almost sure that if you’re using Windows, you have IE installed, so, it’s easier for them to offer the product without being worried if you have a capable browser.
From another point of view, it’s easiest to develop something that works with IE (throught ActiveX), Firefox, nor Opera, nor Safari are able to use ActiveX, so, make the online scanners work with those browsers means re-evaluate the code and generate a new one for every browser.
And from a final point of view, (mine actually), they don’t seem to understand the scope of the problem, you have 6 online scanners here (pretty good ones most of them), but only one works with a non IE browser, tricky question time! — what if the browser (IE) have been hijacked? or DNS? or the hosts file have been modified to redirect every known security page to 127.0.0.1?
Those are things that happen, is very common for several infections, thus the big problem is:
- You’ve a virus, malware, spyware, hijacker, adware, bot, trojan, worm, you named it.
- Good, you’ve several virus’ online scanners =D
- *sight* IE is blocked so you can’t use those online services…./meh cry
So, if several infections (a big number of them) targets IE (and that isn’t a “not known” thing), then I think that there’s a big misconception on those online services.
LKP
Is there any online virus scanners for non microsoft OS( Linux, Mac). Maybe they dont need them, but still it would be very interesting if such sites exist.
No, that’s not really what that is indicating. It’s mostly because the virus scanners use ActiveX as the method of accessing and scanning a user’s computer, which is only offered in Internet Explorer.
The Trend Micro one above does work with Macs, but that was really the only one that I could find. The need for them just isn’t there right now, so I don’t think developers will be taking the time to create them.
For scanning individual files, you can’t beat http://www.virustotal.com - at the time of this writing they send your file through 32 different scanning engines and spit out a summary report. Very nice.
That actually looks like a great service…thanks for pointing it out.
Ryan,
One service that you did not mention was another one offered by Panda which is called Nanoscan. I have found that it works very quickly and is compatible with MS Vista as well which is also a plus.
http://www.nanoscan.com/
Thanks
Tech-Weekly
@LKP: Think again! ActiveX for Mozilla: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm