Is there a safe way to check out an EXE file?

[John]

Is there any way of testing, or checking out what a particular .exe file
will do? Opening it in notepas is worthless. It would be great if there was
way to run the tink in some kind of "safe testing environement" that can
give a log of just what the exe did.

Anything even close? I'd like to know if there are hidden virus,trojan,
loggers etc.

-John

 

[Todd H.]

Is there any way of testing, or checking out what a particular .exe file
will do? Opening it in notepas is worthless. It would be great if there was
way to run the tink in some kind of "safe testing environement" that can
give a log of just what the exe did.

Anything even close? I'd like to know if there are hidden virus,trojan,
loggers etc.

VMWare is a useful tool for this sort of thing--you start with a
windows virtual machine and can run it in there.

A disassembler would be what you'd want to really get into the gritty
details. Without training or a lot of knowledge of assembly
programming, you may not want to go there.

 

[Art]

Is there any way of testing, or checking out what a particular .exe file
will do? Opening it in notepas is worthless. It would be great if there was
way to run the tink in some kind of "safe testing environement" that can
give a log of just what the exe did.

Anything even close? I'd like to know if there are hidden virus,trojan,
loggers etc.

To add to what Todd wrote, there is at least one antivirus product
that has the ability to sandbox files and actually provide a verbal
description ... much like the descriptions you see provided by many
av vendors at their web sites. The product is Norman Virus Control
(NVC) :

http://www.norman.com/

Art
http://home.epix.net/~artnpeg

 

[* * Chas]

Is there any way of testing, or checking out what a particular .exe file
will do? Opening it in notepas is worthless. It would be great if there was
way to run the tink in some kind of "safe testing environement" that can
give a log of just what the exe did.

Anything even close? I'd like to know if there are hidden virus,trojan,
loggers etc.

-John

This isn't the "do it yourself" solution but you can do can do a Google
search of the name of the .exe file. You will usually find several sites
with descriptions of what the file is and does.

Chas.

 

[Spacen Jasset]

Is there any way of testing, or checking out what a particular .exe file
will do? Opening it in notepas is worthless. It would be great if there was
way to run the tink in some kind of "safe testing environement" that can
give a log of just what the exe did.

Anything even close? I'd like to know if there are hidden virus,trojan,
loggers etc.

-John

You could try prevx1 r (research edition)