Live CD/USB Anti Virus Applications.

[Jayce]

Anybody use these? I figured I would add one to my collection of LiveUSB flash drives that I carry around for troubleshooting purposes. I came across Kaspersky Live and threw it on a flash drive. I found it interesting how it works, updates within the interface and then scans. I have yet to really put it to the test, but I have heard positive reviews of Kaspersky in the past so I hope and expect it to work beautifully for those heavily infected systems that can't successfully boot.

Likewise, this brings up a few questions. For one, I'm curious what other LiveUSB/CD Anti Virus apps are out there. I'm wondering if there's anything else to consider or if Kaspersky is a home run in itself. Secondly, I'm wondering to what degree these flash drives are safe in regard to spreading other infections. I suppose in order for a virus to run, the operating system has to be online and initiated with its series of processes, which would also include the infection in question. That being said, if I boot to a flash drive like this, what is happening in the background? Is it possible that anything besides the updates are being written to the flash drive?

I've had the unfortunate (or maybe it's fortunate) experience of first hand seeing how infections can spread from one flash drive to a computer to an external hard drive so very easily, so it has me on high alert to make sure if I use this flash drive on one system that when I go to another, I don't infect that one with anything. Overall I was just curious how the read/write process of Kaspersky Live would interact with the system itself.

 

[Yami]

Hiren's BootCD 12.0 - All in one Bootable CD » www.hiren.info

Has them all for you already Along with many, many other helpful programs. Just install it to a USB stick (it's actually more complicated than that but there's a guide).

 

[Jayce]

Do these work in the same way, where I can update each of the so they're at the latest definition?

EDIT - I put Hirens on a CD and booted to it on my laptop. On a hunch I decided to run superantispyware from it just to try it. It came back with 2 infections, saying software/microsoft/windows NT/current version/blah blah was infected.

Windows isn't on this computer. Only Ubuntu.

lololol? Maybe I'll just put Kaspersky Live back... not sure I trust a boot CD telling me I have bad Windows registry keys on a Linux computer... I'm also finding several things loaded onto it don't even launch, such as Malwarebytes and several partition recovery tools I tried to launch...

 

[Jayce]

Recently I've been trying a few other Live CD/USB AV's out. Avira seemed nice but I could not figure out how to delete infections when the scan was completed. If anybody knows, please shed some light.

I also checked out BitDefender's Rescue CD. It updates automatically when you boot up. I can't seem to figure out how to update via flash drive or whatever, which is a bummer. However, it updates MUCH quicker than Kaspersky, which is a +1.

While reviewing the Kaspersky forums, it seems some users have experienced deleted data when running Kaspersky Rescue CD on RAID systems. Two or three users confirmed on that thread they had it happen. Kind of scary... Hopefully there will be a fix soon...

I know there's a system at work that is infected that I have sitting offline for this purpose of trying out these AVs. After Avira's odd incapability of not being able to delete the infections it found on that system (or maybe I just have no idea what I'm doing with it) I want to see what BitDefender does on the system... Curious to see if it'll stack up as good as its reviews say it does.