Computer pests are a large and growing class of miscreant computer programs that go beyond mere viruses. Computer pests include trojan horses, spyware, hacker tools (such as password crackers, network sniffers, and keystroke loggers), remote administration trojans, and tools used to initiate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Pests are generally uninvited programs that take up residence by stealth like parasites on an information system. A computer pest might be the instrument of hacking, covert data gathering, vandalism, cyber-terrorism, commercial espionage, or employee sabotage. 

Computer pests are a social menace. Like a virus, a single type of pest can often infect the systems of many companies. But unlike a virus, a pest such as a DDoS zombie on one company's Internet server has the potential for damaging the machines of many other companies - with the added potential for significant loss of business, legal damages, negative publicity, and many other unwelcome problems above and beyond purely technical issues. When a company goes into battle against a pest, it helps not only itself but also the larger Internet community.

Computer pests are normally not detected or removed by anti-virus software. Viruses are code fragments that infect individual files or file types. Pests, on the other hand, are stand-alone programs, sometimes disguised as games, utilities or screen savers, and require a different approach to prevention and removal.

Unfortunately, most consumers - and many systems administrators - mistakenly believe that their anti-virus software will deal with all malicious code. The result is pests going undetected. Software to remove pests does exist, however, and due diligence suggests that management ensure such software is implemented within their organizations.

PestPatrol scans your system, looking specifically for malicious code. It currently can detect some 32,000 pests, and the database continues to grow. PestPatrol is designed to be very fast and can scan 33,000 files per minute.

How does PestPatrol differ from anti-virus software?
PestPatrol is not an anti-virus product and it will not remove viruses. PestPatrol looks for and detects other malicious code, including trojans, hacker tools, Denial-of-Service attack agents, and spyware. Since anti-virus products focus on viruses, PestPatrol used in conjunction with an anti-virus product offers complete and reliable protection from the full complement of malicious code that might result in downtime, loss of employee productivity and dissemination of dangerous code.

How does PestPatrol stay current?
We have created a number of tools that automatically manage the PestPatrol database, trapping new malicious code and constantly updating the database. Such new files are downloaded and automatically analyzed.

Information on how to remove this malicious code from the registry, from ini files, and from the file system is automatically added to our PestPatrol.dat database. The database is automatically posted to the web site so that users of PestPatrol have access to the latest strings; the product looks for updates and downloads them automatically, too. The result: PestPatrol can detect a pest within a few minutes of its availability on the Internet and have the necessary removal information immediately available.

Compatibility with anti-virus
PestPatrol is designed to work with anti-virus software, not instead of it. This design required that several conditions be met:

• the scanning time for PestPatrol needed to be lightning fast;
• the product needed to be "lightweight", taking little machine overhead;
• the product needed to detect problems that the anti-virus software missed, with little overlap.

PestPatrol benefits
PestPatrol is fast because its detection algorithms are specifically built for pest detection. At the time of writing, the database contains 11 different pieces of information on each of 32,000 different pests - over 350,000 information elements.

PestPatrol is flexible, with powerful command line capabilities to facilitate scheduling, network-wide scanning (including systems connecting to corporate servers via VPN), reporting, and updating.

PestPatrol combines speed, a mature database and automated updating capability offering complete and reliable protection from dangerous code.