ESET SysInspector sniffs out malware but can't kill it

Your PC is unstable, behaving very strangely, and you think there's a good chance that it's been infected by malware. Yet your antivirus software hasn't noticed anything at all. So what do you do now?

ESET SysInspector provides an easy way to begin the detection process. It's portable, so there's no need to install anything -- just download the executable, run it, and SysInspector will examine your system files, startup programs, running processes, network connections and other details, before issuing a report highlighting anything it thinks is suspicious.

The program uses heuristics, rather than a signature database, which means the scan is relatively quick -- it took only around 90 seconds on our test PC. But of course this can also mean the results are a little, well, vague, greatly limiting their usefulness.

Running processes, for instance, are displayed in one of three colors to highlight them as Safe, Unknown or Risky. Which sounded reasonable, until we found there were no less than 35 processes tagged as Unknown on our test PC: we could have produced a shorter list of suspects manually, without using SysInspector at all.

And the "Important Registry Entries" area of the report can also leave you feeling a little overwhelmed. We expanded the Network section and found it had highlighted 88 keys as Unknown, which could leave us with plenty of detective work to do.

Still, we found SysInspector was much more successful elsewhere, with the program doing a good job of highlighting just a few potentially suspect network connections, print monitors, services, drivers and scheduled tasks, amongst other key details.

Of course you won't have to worry about the number of items flagged as "Unknown," either, if SysInspector is able to zoom in on the source of your infection. And it seems it really can: we installed a keylogger and this was immediately flagged as the only "Risky" item on our system.

SysInspector can't then do anything with this information, unfortunately, as it's only about detection, and can't remove any threats it might find. The program is still a useful tool to begin the work of identifying an infection, though, especially as scans are so quick: it might not find something every time, but as it only takes a couple of minutes to return a verdict then that really isn't a problem. ESET SysInspector can still save you a great deal of time when you're hunting for malware, and that's why we think it deserves a place in every PC owner's security toolbox.