Five Best Free Malware Removal Tools [Favorites]

infection

I honestly don’t know what some users do to get some of the infections I have seen. From multiple fake anti-virus applications to fake blue screens, I have seen it all. I thought I would share my five favorite tools for getting rid of malware on an infected machine.

MalwareBytes – this is my “go to” application because it will find and remove the mild to medium infections in 5-20 minutes. It is free, easy to use, and through. The best part is that it will install and run in Windows safe mode to help you regain control of the completely infected system.
Combofix – this is my favorite sidekick for MalwareBytes. Disable the anti-virus on the infected computer and then run this software and it will find the stealthy malware that most of the rest of this list won’t remove. One word of caution, running this program will disconnect any network connection before running, so don’t use this remotely.
Super Anti-Spyware – used to be my favorite tool before I found MalwareBytes, but it is still useful. My favorite feature of this program is that it will run on server operating systems, when you have a user that was infected while using Roaming Profiles or Terminal Services.
AVG Free Edition – not only is AVG Free a great anti-virus program but it is better at catching malware than something like Symantec Endpoint. My favorite feature of AVG Free is that I can connect an infected hard drive to my system with a USB kit and scan the hard drive at rest. AVG also will do scans in safe mode using the command prompt if needed. Out of the 5 listed, AVG is the least effective if the computer already has an anti-virus installed.
Remove Fake Antivirus – this program does one thing and one thing only: it will remove the fake anti-virus software from your machine so then you can run MalwareBytes to check it for additional infections.