Ten Minutes With Nanoscan March 15, 2007

What is it? Nanoscan is an online ‘Web 2.0’ scanning engine run by Panda, which claims to be able to verify whether a computer is infected with viruses and other whatnot in les than a minute. NanoScan is a small ActiveX download which scans the active programs on a computer against a malware database of more than 600,000 threats. It also uses Panda’s TruPrevent system to detect unknown threats that have not yet made it into the virus library.

Any good? A good quick check if you’re worried about infection, but undermined by confusing scaremongering in deeper scans.

My 10 minutes: Loading is very simple and Web 2.0–ey, although for now it only works in Internet Explorer (you can use a Firefox extension like IE Tab, and indeed Panda suggest this and helpfully provide a link.) The scan in my case took less than 20 seconds, which is fast, although I must confess I don’t have a knowingly infected computer to try it out on. But if you’re clean on that probe you can at least rest easy that not everything is kaput.

Once that is done you’ve got the option of going for deeper probes for improved satisfaction.

My five minute Quick scan ran into trouble because of my Internet connection (an occupational hazard in these parts) which ended up crashing my browser. But I was back on track quick enough and the components loaded themselves in less than a minute. The scan itself took only five minutes as promised, but this is where the problems began.

Nowadays it’s hard to tell between a purely malicious and evil virus and something less damaging but equally sinister — malware that may be turning your computer into a botnet, or simply a cookie from a site that isn’t very pleasant. The cookie isn’t going to really ruin your day, whereas a virus or trojan might.

My Quick scan showed up 32 examples of “less dangerous malicious software”, all of which turned out to be cookies, but the big red alarm sign and the big red lettering “PC Infected” might make the user think their computer was severely compromised. Mine wasn’t; most of the cookies belonged to StatCounter, a web tracker that doesn’t seem to figure large on anyone’s hate lists:

At the bottom of this list you are asked whether you want to “disinfect” and told you have to register first.All these “infections” are pre-selected, and the important information about their origin is hidden from easy view (although there is a button allowing you to save all this data to a text file, which is a nice touch), so chances are you’ll click on the big green button:

You’re then asked for your email address and password. A few seconds later, in my case, an error message comes back saying:

So I tried again. Same result. Twice. By then my time and patience had run out. As the program has just been launched I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t have time, because the whole point of this blog is that only 10 minutes are allowed to review each product, to take in the full scan which promises to do a full scan of your PC.

Verdict: Keep the page bookmarked. An excellent tool for a quick scan; does what it says it will do. Misleading when it tries to sucker the user into registering.

Score: 5 out of 10