Emsisoft Emergency Kit (EEK) is a set of programs designed to repair PC in cases of bad infection. Like other Emergency scanners, the kit is not suitable for daily protection, but for malware detection and removal only. Differently from some other scanners, it is not single program, but a set of Anti-Malware tools distributed as zipped package.
There are 4 tools in Emsisoft Emergency Kit: Emsisoft Emergency scanner, command line scanner, HijackFree and BlitzBlank (an utility for removing malicious files that are locked or protected). Each of them can be launched separately, or from menu launcher in main folder(start.exe).
Emsisoft Emergency Scanner is the same scanner as in Emsisoft Anti-Malware suite. It provides same level of detection and malware removal, but does not require install. This is beneficial when installation is blocked by malware or one has to run removers from USB drive. Emsisoft has quite good detection ratio, and even Emergency Scanner has update module that downloads and updates the signature database. However there is a slight issue on Windows 7 or Vista systems: You have to launch Emsisoft Emergency Scanner as administrator (with elevated permissions) or it might fail in some cases.
The command line scanner is handy in cases when one can’t launch graphical interface. For example, malware might mess with various libraries on infected PC and Emsisoft Emergency scanner fails to initialize. Comand line utility offers same functionality as Emergency Scanner, though you have to specify options as command line parameters.
The third utility, HijackFree is extremely useful replacement of original HijackThis. In my oppinion, its interface is more intuitive than original application, it also offers more various tools to examine processes, autorun entries and network activity. HijackFree is useful in battling malware that is not detected by conventional scanners yet. It shows exact location from where processes have started, thus it is far better than conventional task explorer. Additionally, HijackFree checks each of processes against process database. Processes marked in green are good (with highest probability), processes in yellow – might be both good and bad, and in red – almost always hostile. This simplifies manual detection of malicious software by allowing easy filtering of known and good programs. However, Mark Russinovich’ Process Explorer (distributed by Microsoft) displays processes in hierarchical manner, which allows better judgement on how process started running at first place. For me, it is a tie which program I would choose to investigate system processes.
HijackFree allows fixing startup entries as well. It lists all startup entries and allows easy filtering by startup entry location. The network open port scanner is superb as well, though most of firewalls offer similar functionality.
BlitzBlank should be used by advanced PC users only. This software allows deletion of locked files on reboot. This means that you can delete system files accidently, thus we do not recommend using this utility without double-checking that the file or library has to be deleted.
Overall Emsisoft Emergency Kit is a set of very useful utilities for fixing infected PCs. Although some tasks could be performed by other tools more efficienty, the whole set of Emergency Tools is one of the better ones today.
