14 DAY TRIAL // Trojans are a real pain in the neck and other painful parts of our body. This type of malicious program is disguised as a legitimate application or is embedded in a non threatening software. And when executed, it reveals the true mission by becoming harmful. It can erase or overwrite data on your computer, upload and download files, allow remote access to the computer, spread other malware etc.
What can you do in order to prevent such malware from continuing the activity? The best solution is an anti virus software, but sometimes these can be too expensive. Another solution can be a specially designed software that can hold the malware away or eliminate it from your computer.
Such an application is Trojan Shield, a software developed by TrojanShield Development. The software is free to evaluate for a trial period of 15 days. During all this time, the software is completely functional, so if it detects a trojan on your computer you can remove it with no problems. The price after the 15 days expire is $29.
The interface of the software resembles more the ugly little duck and you can clearly see that it was neglected. But this is not a very important issue, as the software was not developed to look good, but to protect your computer from malware and throw the trojans out of your machine.
I was deceived by the fact that, when you first open the application, you can only see Anti-Trojan window. But the application has some other surprises for the user, like the process and startup managers, tracer, pinger and resolver.
All the above mentioned features will be opened in separate windows and act as stand alone applications. The Anti-Trojan function of the software comprises options like memory and disk scanning, disinfect file, settings and trojan monitor.
But the core of the application is the Console. This is where you can activate every other feature the program is equipped with. The first icon in the toolbar is the About one (pretty unusual as this is placed at the end of the toolbar buttons in any other application). Next icon is for the Anti Trojan feature.
The Process Manager feature is similar to the Windows Task Manager, the difference is that TrojanShield does not display the amount of memory used by the process. The three options in this window are Run Application, Running Applications and Application Information.
Startup Manager will show you all the applications that load with Windows. The user can remove the unwanted items from the list by right-clicking on one of the elements and choosing the Remove from Startup option.
If the software has detected an attack on your computer, you can select the Whois Client feature which will initialize Tracer, an option which will try to obtain more details about the hacker. Enabling the Advanced options will allow the user to select a tracer server from the myriad available.
Pinging the IP addresses is easy when you choose Pinger from the Trojan Shield Console. This way, you can see if the host is reachable or not. The two functions contained by this feature are Ping and Trace Route (just enter the IP or the host name and press Trace).
Next feature in line is Resolver. This tool is designed to resolve the host name of the hacker's IP address. Usually, the host name will give away which ISP (Internet Service Provider) the hacker is using. Thus, you can make a complaint to the ISP about the hacker's break-in attempt. Resolver can also be used to find out the IP address of a website.
Whenever you get an alert of a break-in attack, you will hear an alarm-like sound and the Console will pop up displaying the name of the trojan used and the remote address IP, as well as the local and remote port used. If you right-click on the attack attempt you will benefit from a series of options designed to disable the hacker. You can choose to close the connection, crash or flood hacker's client, ignore the IP (if you consider it to be a false alarm), or choose to trace the hacker (Whois Lookup and Resolve Host).
The Settings section in Anti-Trojan feature comprises four tabs that allow you to configure the application. The software can be configured to scan the memory or load the trojan monitor at startup, or to automatically detect the trojans. You can also choose the type of files to be scanned by the application (all the files or just the executables). If you have some safe files that could be interpreted by the program as being a trojan, than you can add them in Safe Files. The last tab in the Settings menu is called Trojans. Here you will find a list of 303 trojans the software can detect.
The Good
It is good to know what the software could have done for us. The user can find out websites IP addresses. The sound of the alarm can be changed as long as it is a .wav file.
The Bad
All sorts of problems here, from the spelling and grammar errors in the Help menu to the fact that the application detected a break-in attempt from my own IP address. I do not want to mention that in half an hour the software detected attacks from all the IP addresses I had in the local network.
And even if I chose to ignore that address forever, every time I restarted the Console, the problem persisted.
Trying to trace the hacker put me on a very long holding list, as I have waited for the server to connect. Trying different servers did not make me happy. I admit I have not tried all the trace servers, but I randomly chose twenty of them and I got no feedback in five minutes. It did not even connect to the server.
The Truth
I was very glad to see how many features the software is equipped with. And, by seeing them, I even deceived myself that hackers can no longer gain control on my computer. Seeing the attack attempts, I realized that everybody at Softpedia Iasi is a true hacker (even the News chicks).
Five stars for features, but a tiny non-sparkling one for value and price.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
