McAfee Stinger is a new free antivirus that runs completely in a standalone mode. Running a virus scan is as easy as launching the executable file and there is no installation necessary. Stinger simply launches and a user just needs to hit the scan now button. A virus scan will be performed and all detected viruses will automatically be repaired. The program includes virus definitions (DAT files) that are identical to the retail McAfee Products.
The current version was released on April 15, 2010 and new versions are released weekly. The included virus definitions provide protection against all of the latest viruses including all variants of FakeAlert, Rootkits, Vundo, Conficker, Koobface, Sober, Zotob, and many more. In fact, the virus list contains definitions for over 1600 different malware. One can think of the Stinger antivirus as a comprehensive Microsoft Malicious Software Remocal Tool that is download every month via Windows Update. Both software’s contain definitions for the most prevalent threats while Stinger goes above and beyond offering a broader definition list and better cleaning capabilities.
The virus scanning is extremely fast. In fact, the first scan completed in under 5 minutes with a full scan of the entire C: drive. Very few antivirus can even compare to these scanning speeds. While scanning, the program only used a very reasonable 30 megabytes of RAM and about 3 percent CPU usage. Therefore, McAfee Stinger is perfect for slower systems and even computers loaded with Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
McAfee Stinger includes several tweakable settings that are not usually included in a standalone scanner. The first notable feature is a Boot Sector scan option which is crucial as viruses often hide in the Boot Sector (the beginning of the drive usually hidden by the OS). This makes viruses sometimes undetectable by a lot of freeware antivirus. The next surprising feature is the heuristic capability and the ability to tweak the sensitivity. Heuristics are a method to find suspicious files or viruses in which definitions have not been released. Again heuristic capability is not usually found in standalone antivirus.
I encountered a few problems with the Stinger software. Once a scan is complete, I am getting several discrepancies on what files are actually cleaned. On one scan the program stated that it removed 350 different files, while on another scan the program claimed it cleaned 59,000 files. These different cleaned amounts occurred when running consecutive scans. Another problem is that the Stinger’s logging capability is really lacking. Even when saving the log to an external file, I was unable to see what files were actually cleaned. All of this lead to further confusion about what was actually “cleaned” and whether the software was deleting false positives. However, according to many user reviews on the internet, Stinger’s automatic virus deletion capability is actually considered a positive feature of the program. This is because the program has a sort of set it and forget functionality. The program can even be controlled via the command prompt for automatic scanning upon every computer restart.