The Cleaner 4.0 - part I

by Andrew Cooper

The Cleaner is a pioneer anti-trojan scanner recently released newly by MooSoft as version 4.0 and I decided to test it and share my impressions with you.

Before getting to the review, I want to say again why we all should consider anti-trojan scanners as everyday protection tools for our computers.

In the past Trojan horses (also known as "backdoors") were not taken seriously enough by antivirus software vendors, which is why a new class of program appeared on the scene: anti-trojan scanners. This software fights all kinds of Trojan horses by detecting them on your hard drive and in your memory and removing them from your computer.

The methods used by anti-trojans to detect and remove backdoor agents do not differ much from their older brothers, antivirus apps. What really distinguishes anti-trojans from antiviruses is that they know many more Trojans because they specialize in them.

Today the situation has greatly improved and antivirus vendors now pay more attention to the known Trojan horses in their virus definition libraries, however anti-trojan scanners can still detect a far greater number of Trojans. It is simply because most anti-trojan vendors are focused on finding Trojan horses so they include every backdoor they can find to their libraries.

We definitely should consider anti-trojan scanners necessary for our protection that already includes a personal firewall and antivirus software. However, some people may escape falling victim of a Trojan by just following general security measures and correctly configuring firewall settings, which is always a good practice.

First impressions

I went to www.moosoft.com and quickly downloaded its 4MB distribution package. Installation was smooth and at the final dialog window I was prompted to launch the Cleaner and its components (TCActive and TCMonitor) right after hitting the Finish button:



Two decent icons immediately appeared in the system tray. Simultaneously the main program window was displayed:



Cleaner's main window includes the following buttons: "Scan System", "Options", "Trojan Database", "Quarantine" and "System information".

Before I describe what hides behind these buttons, let's update our Trojan definitions since it shows that the database is dated November 26, 2003.

I went to File and chose Update. After that it asked me what components I would like to update. Eager to test the latest version I selected all the components and pressed the "Update" button. These started downloading from the developer's server (the file size was just 2.4 MB)

Continue to Part II