Viruses, Trojan horses, worms and malicious specimens of all kinds roam the Internet and eventually sneak into computers. Malware creators are ahead with increasingly sophisticated developments and advanced cyber-attacks that take advantage of user carelessness or laziness and software vulnerabilities that are not patched in time. It’s time to act.

Successive lists of the worst cyber security incidents confirm that we still have work to do. And it’s hard to keep yourself safe. You may think it won’t affect you until it does, no matter how careful you are, and you undoubtedly need to be. In today’s world, 100% connected and with dozens of devices used in every home, computer security solutions are a good tool to rely on. Having at least a basic solution is highly recommended, especially in Windows operating systems, the most used and most attacked and the ones we will focus on.

Why are rescue antiviruses so useful?

Among the large group of security solutions, the so-called ‘rescue’ stands out, which are started from an external drive even before the operating system is booted and therefore have remarkable benefits through a typical installed antivirus.

It should be remembered here that there are malicious samples that are loaded into memory before starting the system and before running the installed antivirus, so it is unable to detect or remove it. Another advantage is that antiviruses of this group do not need to be installed on the computer or run permanently, which reduces the consumption of installed resources and does not penalize performance.

If you find abnormal operation of any part of your PC; you have random errors; you are missing files; your passwords have been changed: default applications have changed, and in general, if you notice “strange” things, it’s time to check your personal computer.

Creation and management

Rescue antivirus they are created on external drives in “Live” formats. which have auto-start capability and operate independently of the operating system. Optical media or better flash drives can be used more safely and widely today. Virtually all of them are based on some GNU/Linux distribution, and the providers we’ll see below offer the possibility to create them from their website or from a downloadable .ISO or .IMG image that can be processed with specialized applications such as Rufus, UNetbootin or similar.

Once created, its use is similar to other rescue tools. You simply reboot your computer with the media inserted to boot from it and, if you haven’t done so before, place it as the first boot device before your computer’s storage drive.

After booting, you will see different interfaces, some in text mode and others visual with many functions, although all of them have (almost) what we find in an installed antivirus including the necessary virus database updates, boot sector scanning and disinfection, and files and folders on internal or external discs. It has direct access to the disk and the file system, and they are able to eliminate persistent threats that sometimes cannot be installed.

Choosing a free rescue antivirus

All major computer security specialists offer some kind of free solution of this type. Unfortunately, not all of them are still up-to-date in terms of interface and functionality, although updating the definitions of the latest detected viruses and its scanning and sanitizing capacity.

As we mentioned above, some providers offer the ability to create media directly from their website with their own creation tutorial that is very similar for all, or an ISO or IMG image that can be used to create the media. We leave you with some of the free ones available.

ESET SysRescue Live

One of the best maintained and updated with support for all windows, client and server. It can be used from CD, DVD or USB and like others, independent of the operating system. It has several operating modes, “Scan on Demand”, “Smart Scan” or “Custom Scan”.

AVG Rescue CD

It offers two different images to create on CD or USB. Its interface is quite spartan and text-based, but don’t worry, it gets the job done and, like the others, it updates the virus database to the latest available in advance.

Kaspersky Rescue Disk

Kaspersky hasn’t updated the interface in a while, but its Gentoo-based Rescue Disk is at the forefront of consumer security solutions. You download the ISO image, burn it to bootable media and use it.

Norton Bootable Recovery Tool

It offers a wizard to create a bootable disk that makes it easy to create without external applications once you download the tool. After booting into it, you’ll see a graphical but minimalistic interface with no customization options, with two main options: scan and clean.

Panda SafeDisk

Another outdated interface, but very easy to use because it doesn’t have too many customization options. It will load a wizard that automatically searches for available antivirus definitions, and when you press Start, it will begin scanning the entire system for malicious files.

Trend Micro Rescue Disk

Very simple creation of rescue media by clicking a button from its website and with the option of choosing CD/DVD or USB disk/clip. Its interface is the most spartan of the entire list, in a minimalistic text mode with few basic options.

Avira rescue system

Offers a downloadable image for media creation. A graphical interface with several functions, but easy to use. Like others we’ve seen with a simple interface, its strength lies in its search and disinfection engine and its ability to update its virus database, which they all do.

Bitdefender Rescue CD

Personally, it’s one of my favorites. Or I liked them because they were deprecated in exchange for Bitdefender Rescue Mode. It uses Xubuntu-based Linux, which allows more options besides virus removal. You download the ISO from the link and burn it in the middle. We’ll leave you with a link to web.archive where it’s still available. Like others, even if the version is not updated, it downloads the latest definitions and does the job.

F-Secure Rescue CD

A super classic that has freed us from viruses more than once…. It hasn’t been updated in a long time, but it’s another one that can be used. There is no real user interface with Knoppix base other than a text dialog asking if you want to start the analysis.

Avast

It does not offer a direct image download and the only option is to create a rescue disk from an already installed Avast solution. The good thing is that this can be done from the free desktop version. You create media and can delete it if you want.

Keep some of these on hand because sometimes they are necessary to remove persistent malware which, once loaded into memory and run by the operating system, is difficult to eradicate or even detect. In addition, this type of solution does not penalize performance because it works independently of the computer’s operating system. Very useful from time to time to start and check the status of the computer and eliminate the security threats that lie in wait for us.