Stand-Alone Antivirus Software? 159
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that repairs specialty devices that have an embedded Mini-ATX motherboard without a CD-ROM drive and run Windows XP Home. And while the USB flash drives we insert into them have a physical write-protect tab, we still encounter a (rather annoying) display dialog from malware/viruses to remove the write-protect so the malware can infect the flash drive. We don't remove the write-protect, obviously, but would like to offer our customers the option of removing the malware/virus without having to install any software. We would rather not install/uninstall antivirus software even for one-time use, due to various licensing issues, nor do we want to connect to the Internet to use web-based online scanners. Is there any stand-alone anti-virus/anti-malware software for Windows that can be run directly from the write-protected flash drive itself?"
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Use Windows Embdded, not XP Home (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in a similar environment, and although I can't recommend a virus program, I can suggest ways to prevent it. It sounds like the company is creating an embedded device, but is not using an embedded operating system. Microsoft Windows embedded forbids writes to the C: drive when you enable EWF or FBWF. EWF gives you a memory overlay so software *can* write to C:, but if you get infected, you just reboot the machine. Alternatively, a good Micro-ATX BIOS will support making the drives read-only.
Re:clamav (Score:3, Insightful)
While it won't catch everything, clamav i believe can be setup on the usb drive to be used that way.
Nothing will catch everything, The second you write it to disk your virus definitions will be out of date.
Re:clamav (Score:3, Insightful)
99% of what? The viruses they have definitions for? There's not a product on the market that catches 99% of all viruses.
You might make a comparison of the number of entries in their definitions library, or the different techniques each has available to match the various types of obfuscation in use, but a claim of catching 99% is both meaningless and unsupportable.
Re:You need a bigger gun. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a good suggestion, but these are likely random users bringing in an out of warranty computer. They ideally should be keeping their own clean images, but they didn't, and they don't want to lose their stuff. Scan and clean is the way to go here, not reimage.