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UnHackMe 5.9.9 Review – Rootkit and Trojan Remover and Monitor


Thursday, 28 October 2010 12:27:15 (US Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

   

    UnHackMe is a rootkit scanner and monitor.  The program is small at only 10 megabytes in size and appears to work in conjunction with another free antivirus RegRun.  Both programs are from the same publisher Greatis software. 

    UnHackMe protects against rootkits which are some of the most damaging malware types to ones computer.  The first rootkit to be publically released was the Sony CD driver rootkit.  Since then rootkits are now coded into a large of amount of the latest malware.  Virus writers do this because it makes the malware contained in the rootkit that more difficult to detect by standard free antivirus.  UnHackMe states that because rootkits are compressed and encrypted, it makes them extremely difficult to detect by antivirus.

     The scanning process of UnHackMe is extremely quick.  The scan literally takes just a few seconds to complete.  However, the treasure of UnHackMe is in its monitoring system which uses only  3 megabytes of RAM to provide a full range of protection against rootkits.  The program includes auto update functionality.

     One thing that I like about UnHackMe is that it includes a sample virus alert.  This means that a user isn’t surprised when a real root kit is detected.  The sample rootkit is HackerDefender which UnHackMe provides full protection against.  The program provides  a lot of useful options to deal with HackerDefender.  The file can be deleted on the next reboot, attempt to force stop the file, disable autorun, delete the registry keys, label the file as a false positive, and setup an automatic recovery point.  Essentially, everything one needs to permanently delete and disable any rootkit.  The detection screen also displays all of the various locations that the rootkit was detected at.

    UnHackMe also includes other advanced features such as an exclusion list and wizard.  In addition, the real-time shield can also be tweaked based upon a systems performance.
Finally, UnHackMe utilizes the RegRun suite for extensive malware cleaning.  It seems that RegRun is included for more advanced analysis of one’s system.  RegRun is a standalone program that I want to review at a later time.