Sobig.a Cleaner

Sobig.a Cleaner is a featherlight and portable application designed to scan computers for the Sobig worm and remove it to restore its optimal working conditions.

It gets sent to mail addresses found in files with the .dbx, .eml, .hlp, .htm, .html, .mht, .wab and .txt extension. The tool doesn't need previous experience with anti-malware applications, since it does most of the job on its own.

It's wrapped in a simple interface made from a single window that asks you to pick the scan target between all fixed drives or just a single one, if you have suspicions considering the worm's whereabouts. By picking just one drive from the list, you can significantly reduce scan time. In addition to the files from the drives, the application searches for Sobig's entries in the Windows registry.

According to the developer, you should make sure that no security application containing a real-time engine is running at the same time with Sobig.a Cleaner, since this might cause software conflicts that may lead to Window stability issues, such as blue screens.

During the scanning operation, you can view the full path of the currently scanned object in the status bar. On completion, the tool lets you know whether or not it detected anything worth cleaning. In case it did, it lists the files in question and gives you the possibility to further examine them as well as to pick the ones to eliminate while keeping the rest in their current location on the disk. To make sure that objects currently used by the computer are successfully removed, it's necessary to reboot it.

Installation is not required, so you can download the .exe file and directly run it on any PC from a pen drive or other kinds of removable storage devices.

Scans were quickly carried out in our tests, during which the app remained light on system resources consumption. It didn't hang, crash or prompt errors in our tests. You should be aware that it's a virus removal tool, so it doesn't provide real-time protection against future infections.

However, the worm is pretty old now and rarely reported by the user community. This is also the reason why Sobig.a Cleaner can no longer be downloaded from the developer's website.