I just came across a new anti-malware tool, called “Panda Nanoscan”, and accessible at http://www.nanoscan.com.

“Well, that’s what I call YAST” (Yet Another Scanning Tool), I thought at first. I decided to test it, anyway. The neat web 2.0 interface is composed of three main elements: a statistical tool called “infex” at the top left, where several data about infected computers are shown; a few navigation links at the bottom, where you can access different secondary pages like a blog, gadgets to add nanoscan to your personalized homepages, etc; and finally, a button that would “Nanoscan my PC”. After clicking on that button, I was asked to install an ActiveX component developed by Panda, which I of course did (it took a bit less than one minute). As soon as installation was done, the scanning process started, and.. know what? It took only 54 seconds! I repeated the process twice, and it took 20 and 24 secs. I looked at the documentation, and learnd that it looks for running malware, so it seems to be checking active processes only, but anyhow it was quite an impressive result, considering that it searched for more than two million malware variants. After showing the results, it recommends running a more in-depth scanning with other tools, inlcuding a full system scan, which I also tested, but that might be covered in a different post. Oh, by the way, my computer was, as I expected, free of any unwanted malware specimens.