All of us know that we cannot count on one antivirus to 100% protect us from computer virus. Since one antivirus can’t protect us, installing two or more antivirus should offer better protection right? Well logically yes but technically no because antivirus software nowadays are so complex and they’d conflict with each other causing crashes and blue screens. If we’re talking about installing two antivirus 15 years ago on Windows 95, then it’s possible. I remembered running PC-Cillin and Norman back then and no problems at all.

The only way we can put multiple antivirus software on a computer is if we can disable the real-time protection, self-defense and only use it for on-demand scanning. Well if we wanted to scan a single file using on-demand scan, we could upload it to Virustotal and have it scan with 40 antivirus but the problem is Virustotal distributes the file to antivirus company. Trojan coders usually wouldn’t use Virustotal because obviously they don’t want their trojan to get detected.

I recently found a tool called Multi AV Scan developed by Gakh from HackHound that allows you to run on-demand scan using 10 types antivirus on your computer.

Multi AV Scan currently supports A-Squared, Avira AntiVir, BitDefender, ClamWin, DrWeb, Ikarus, McAfee, Solo, Sophos and VBA32. There are a few similar tools such as Multi AV Fixer, KIMS, ScanLix and Mini AV Scanner but they are all no longer in development except Multi AV Scan.

Multiple antivirus on computer

Multi AV Scan works but it’s a little buggy. You have to put the file that you want to scan in the same folder as MultiScan.exe or else the program will say Scanning the whole time without progress. Also if you’re using Avira AntiVir, you need to place Avira license key HBEDV.KEY (where you can get it for free here) file in \AVs\AntiVir\ folder. As for the updates, it takes quite a while to download and update all virus definition signatures. Another issue that I encounter is it takes 99% CPU usage during updating and scanning.

Do take note that Multi AV Scan is not meant to replace the antivirus installed on your computer that has real-time protection. The upcoming Multi AV Scan v1.6.2 will include 2 more antivirus which is Kapersky and VirusBuster. You can download Multi AV Scan from this thread in HackHound forum. There are 3 parts to download from RapidShare.

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