McAfee Stringer: A standalone tool to clean prevalent malware

Thursday, March 22, 2012

McAfee Stringer: A standalone tool to clean prevalent malware

Few days ago I wrote about Remove Fake Antivirus that is able to remove remove rogue softwares. Stinger from McAfee does the same thing and also something more.

Features

According to McAfee

McAfee Stinger detects and removes prevalent Fake Alert malware and threats identified in the "List Viruses" section of the Stinger application. While not a replacement for full fledged antivirus software, Stinger is updated multiple times a week to include detection for newer Fake Alert variants and prevalent viruses.

In its present version (10.2.0.555) built on Mar 22, it detects 4198 viruses, trojans and varients.

So, Stringer is not using the complete database of McAfee and only using that part which is useful to remove most common malwares. Therefore, McAfee Stringer do not provide real-time protection like traditional antimalware and also is not a complete on-demand scanner.

Like Microsoft Safety Scanner, Stringer is also a portable tool and it can be even used to clean offline PC. But still it creates a folder under "program files" and keep two files in it for self protection and for rootkit detection.

Stringer is set to scan Processes, Registry, Boot Sectors and Rootkits. It is set to scan sub-directories and inside compressed files. It can also report potentially unwanted applications. Stringer supports only on kind of scan where it scans in places where malware most likely to hide.

The default action of Stringer upon detecting a virus is "repair" but it can also "report", "rename" and "delete". It is recommended to choose "report" to avoid system crash in case of a false positive detection.

Stringer can check network for informations about suspicious files from heuristic detection. You can disable heuristic check if you want to although the default setting is "medium". You can of course choose low, high, very high settings for heuristic too. It is recommended to choose "very high" settings because only this settings can trigger "Artemis". Please note that without an internet connection or external DNS path Artemis will not function.