Trend Micro HijackThis Portable

It’s commonly known that when installing applications, modifications are made to the system registry and implicitly to the OS settings. In most cases you are aware of these changes but they can also be made in an intrusive manner, without your consent. The best example for this are malware components that reside inside installers and unknowingly apply unnecessary and even potentially dangerous settings.

Trend Micro HijackThis Portable is an application that scans your system's settings to detect any modifications that are made by installed software or malware components. The application is designed to scan your computer and generate a log file with all the detected changes. The log file is automatically exported as a Notepad file which you can save on your computer.

For each detected item, Trend Micro HijackThis Portable adds a code to it. When you look at the resulting scan list, all the entries are alphabetized according to those applied codes. They correspond to changes that are made to the registry, autoloading entries, browsers and other settings. Since the applications is unable to differentiate the changes made by clean software from those made by malware components, you need to be very careful which ones you remove. To help you in this matter and get a better understanding of what the detections means, the application provides you with a detailed explanation for each item in the list.

With Trend Micro HijackThis Portable you also get a series of specialized tools that work great in resolving more delicate issues. Such is ADS Spy scanner, that scans metadata embedded in files. This data is not visible in Windows Explorer and in most cases oblivious to anti-malware scanners, which is not a good sign since malicious code can be hidden inside.

Trend Micro HijackThis Portable doesn’t just use a ‘search and destroy’ approach in dealing with settings hijackers. Its capable of creating backups for known secure settings. Moreover, if you know for a fact that an item that results from a scan and appears in the list is not a threat, you can add it to an ignore list. If you have trouble interpreting reports, you can use LogAnalyzer.

Trend Micro HijackThis Portable is indeed an invaluable tool that helps you make sure that your system maintains stability by reverting unauthorized settings on your computer.