I first started long-term testing Mark Loman's Hitman Pro about four
years ago when it was freeware. In the beginning, I thought it was an
impressive & inventive idea to lineup many of the good known free
antimalware apps and run them serially. At times, Hitman Pro ran
quite well back then. I've seen it be troublesome as Mark kept this
going. Mark had quite a chore to keep the antimalware applications
updated & deal with the applications as some of them expired their
trial versions in your own system.
It was always obvious to me that one day Mark would take Hitman Pro
commercial. When he did, Hitman Pro was taking hours to run
completely and not always smoothly. That's about the time I gave up
and ran my own antimalware applications individually.
I don't have extremely recent experience with Hitman Pro, but I can
see that he still has legal issues from time to time with the
individual application vendors.
Recommendation: Run your own very best compatible antimalware
applications, individually.
HTH
Pete
Other than name and philosophy, Hitman Pro version 3 (more recently
3.5) has nothing to do with Hitman Pro version 2. Version 3.5 is no
longer developed by Mark Loman but it is developed by a team of
developers at SurfRight (also support is handled by them).
Hitman Pro version 3 still combines anti-malware solutions from
different vendors but the anti-malware software is no longer installed
on the end users computer.
Instead, it consults a Scan Cloud (scan servers connected to the
internet) running anti-malware software from multiple vendors.
Hitman Pro version 3 performs a behavioral scan of the computer and
looks for suspicious files. When it finds a suspicious file it
consults the Scan Cloud to confirm whether the suspicious file is
actually malware. The combination of the behavioral scan and the Scan
Cloud allows a full scan to complete in a few minutes (> 20.000 files
in 1-2 minutes). In contrast, version 2 took almost an hour to
complete and a lot of software was installed on the end user's
computer. Version 3 no longer has these drawbacks thanks to the
combination of the behavioral scan and cloud computing
If you think Hitman Pro lists a false positive, then you can expand
the item in the listview to see which Scan Cloud vendor marked the
file as malware. Hitman Pro does not flag a file as malicious, only
the vendors in the Scan Cloud do. So if the file is listed as malware,
it should also be listed as malware by that same vendor on VirusTotal.
Hitman Pro is currently the only cloud computing anti-malware solution
that combines multiple vendors. You use it as second opinion scanner
and you could see the application as an automated VirusTotal.
A lot more info can be found here:
http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro/
and here:
http://www.surfright.nl/en/whatsnew
If you have questions or suggestions, please write an e-mail to the
addresses listed on this page:
http://www.surfright.nl/en/home/contact