HitmanPro

Anti-virus programs are updated more or less frequently in order to recognize and neutralize any new threats as soon as possible.

Compiling and adding new virus signatures to the program’s database takes time, which leaves your system unprotected against new threats between updates. Instead of signatures, HitmanPro uses behavior-based patterns to identify and locate all kinds of threats, regardless of how new they may be.

HitmanPro hasn’t been designed to replace your current anti-virus program, at least not completely. Actually, they complement each other, so they can work together without stepping on each other’s toes. Thus, HitmanPro will keep your PC protected against the newest malware programs from day one, while your anti-virus gets updated with the new detection signatures. Rootkit protection is not exclusive to this tool, but it’s a great add-on for those with an anti-virus program that lacks this functionality (many standard anti-virus tools do). To remove these hard-to-detect threats that sit deep in your OS, the program will use a cloud database with information about HD drivers behave on clean computers and will check if your PC is booting up correctly or if some program is trying to bypass your anti-virus software by starting up first.

One of the great things about this program is that it doesn’t require any installation process. This means that you can use HitmanPro from outside the infected drive and without going through the tedious – and in infected HDs sometimes problematic – installation task whenever you find your computer’s at risk.

As it is usually the case with many similar shareware tools, testing HitmanPro without a license barely allows you to check its scanning capabilities. By the time it takes, I’d like to think that it does perform a deep scan of your system, searching for all kinds of vulnerabilities. Unless your PC is in deep trouble, most of the scan results (if not all, as it was the case with my laptop) will refer to unnecessary traces (cookies and the like) rather than real threats to your safety or privacy. Be it as it may, the free version you can download from the program’s site won’t erase a single cookie from your hard drive, which makes it very hard to evaluate its true potential.