Do you ever wonder if your anti-virus product might have let something nasty slip through?
Sophos has a tool that can help.
The simple and completely free Virus Removal Tool for Windows users runs alongside your current anti-virus product and detects any threats on your PC that your existing product may not have picked up.
The tool has direct access to virus data from SophosLabs, Sophos’s global network of threat researchers, ensuring that even the very latest threats are found and removed.
It detects and, more importantly, disinfects all those nasty viruses, spyware, rootkits and even fake AV, catching the infections your anti-virus might have missed.
Download and run it, wait for it to grab the very latest updates from Sophos, and then let it scan through memory and your hard disk.
If it finds any threats, you can click a button to clean them up. If it doesn’t, then you’ve lost nothing.
With just 3.3% of readers surveyed saying that the only person they watched over IT security-wise was themselves (compared to 43.22% saying they looked after 3-5 people), we know there are more people to think about than just yourself. So feel free to pass this article on to friends, family and colleagues.
No catch, just free protection.
Peter Molloy
But it doesn’t spot or remove El Dorado!
Pgm
Is there a Mac version of the tool?
Paul Ducklin
I’m afraid not. But we do have a full-blown 100% free anti-virus for your Mac:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/lp/sophos-home.aspx
Sophos Home is a complete product (it’s not meant to run alongside your existing product but to replace it), and it lets you protect up to 10 Windows and Mac computers in your household. For free.
Keith Virgo
I have found Sophos to be the best AV software I have used. When I switched from Symantec to Sophos in a company with over 600 users I was totally amazed at what was found that was not picked up by the previous software. I use Sophos personally and would not change., It sits quietly and unobtrusively in the background doing what it was designed to do and does it well.
Phil
Downloading has become quite the trial in itself.
Firstly the famously useless “we want to run the world” US export identity check.
Then the expanded marketing questionnaire asking what my corporate role in what company, despite this being aimed (by inference in the article) at home users.
Finally my existing Sophos AV might have a hand in the download landing page presenting “Not found” in terminally bold font. A few browsers later I realized it was the “.exe” extension my AV objected to (so I assume, anyway).
Then tried saving target as yada.zip and down she came. Whew.
Maybe the download could be a zip, if the boast is that it works along side existing AVs, and so assuming we all have them, they are all going to argue about the .exe extension.
Or.. maybe it’s just me :0(
Paul Ducklin
I just downloaded it and it asked me for my name and email (which I think is a reasonable trade for a free anti-virus tool) and that’s all. I then agreed to the T&Cs and the download started. This worked with Safari on OS X and Edge on Windows 10.
An existing copy of Sophos Anti-Virus shouldn’t stop you downloading EXEs by name – there’s not much point because we recognise the file type by what’s in it (precisely to avoid being tricked if you rename an .EXE to .ZIP).
Is the EXE-block to do with your browser or some browser plugin? (For example, Safari on iOS wont’t download it, presumably on the grounds that there is no point.)
I don’t know how you came to see the marketing questions when downloading one of our free tools. Did you start from the link in our article or from the main downloads page? (If you want to take this offline and private, out of the comments, please just email your reply to tips&sophos.com.)
Anonymous
Thanks for taking the time to recheck the download process and compare notes.
Though I took the provided link pathway, there’s something about Mary, err., me, that probably caused all this hassle. Happy to know it isn’t overkill at your end.
PS, I’m a home UTM user, so while this tool is probably redundant in my case, I can’t resist checking out stuff that says it complements existing AV. Just to take for a spin.
Paul Ducklin
It’s handy to know where/how to grab the Virus Removal Tool, and whst happens next, for when you make those friends-and-family visits thst inevitably lead to, “Oh, now you’re here, woud you mind taking aa look at my appendix/guinea pig/reverse gear/computer?” depending on whether you are a doctor/veterinary surgeon/motor mechanic/IT geek.
Bob
I tried downloading the VRT and at the end of the process got a page with two words on it:
Not Found, at the place the download should have started.
Paul Ducklin
I have seen this once myself…still not sure why. I thought perhaps it was due to using Private Browsing mode, so that a cookie wasn’t shared between windows where perhaps it was needed…but on clearing everything from my browser, and trying again, it worked. So I don’t know quite what to advise, except from, “Would you mind trying again?”