Using Recent File Seeker to detect malware

If you have been infected by malware and your security package that you have been using regularly has not alerted you, then you need to find out the threat by yourself. It sometimes becomes easier than you expect. One of the strategy that can be employed is to search for your system for modified or changed executable files. If you find file format that is EXE that was created yesterday and maybe an SCR file in a temporary folder and you do not know how it was there, then detail investigation is required.

To make this possible, you do not need to install any software. On Windows 8, open Explorer and in the starting folder, click on the Search box.  You could get various parameters based on search done. This is a pretty nice start but Recent File Seeker is advanced with regard to this. It provides extra options for search and saves report which you can share with others.

The program is considered to be a single executable file that is 300 KB in size and does have an interface that is basic. It is a dialog box that runs search and saves the result in a text format file. There will be no view to see reports. Even though, the search is very capable. One of the problem with this tool is that you can get a lot of legal hits. Recent File Seeker does exclude files of Microsoft such that you will not get results of the Windows update you have done last time.

There is also option to check the signatures and you can customize the report by company name, file size, description, file attributes and even the MD5 hash. Once the choice is made, you need to click on Start and wait. Recent File Seeker does scan the system according to the rules that is specified, save the results on a file that is in text format and then saves it in Notepad when it is completed.

The final report received would be awkward to read because it is a plain text file and not something you can organize easily. The options available under search and portability can be helpful and on balance it does deserve a place in your toolkit that is for troubleshooting.

Download Recent File Seeker