Not a lot of people know about this sort of tool, Microsoft is farly new to the spyware, malware, virus, and worm game even though they do make the OS.
In the past and present other company’s have made free (my favorite kind) and payed tools, all have ups and downs and some dont work at all I.E. AV 2009.
Back in 2005 Microsoft created its own spyware killer called “Windows Defender” along with “Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool”, Both came to the tech world with BIG criticism, most where saying “WHY?” I also said the same thing a time or two. Now 4 years into the game Microsoft has improved there Software and Services (yes that includes Vista) one is the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MRT), which is updated once a month using Windows Update or Automatic Updates.
Once you update the computer it is ran after the restart… Well Mine Doesn’t! DAMN XP.
After listening to Security Now With Steve Gibson, I learned about the MRT and how to use it, when ever you want.
MRT lives in the Windows System32 directory under the name MRT.exe.
Simply goto “Start” “Run” and type “MRT” (or type “mrt” on the command line) and there you go.
MRT has three options Quick Scan, Full Scan, and Custom Scan. After the system restarts it runs a quick scan, BUT as all techs know a Full Scan is better.
If you want to view the log from the resulting scan then enter
%WinDir%\Debug\mrt.log
in the Run… dialog. This should open it (the log) in a standard text format.
As you may have found out, this cool tool by Microsoft is a good tool to put in any Tech’s Bag of tricks.
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