Why does ComboFix care about the current date it expires?
I outline the reasons why malware and virus software need to stay up to date.
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Cleaning up after malware
I need to start by saying that I certainly have heard a lot of good things about ComboFix. I haven’t used it in years. So, what I’m going to do here is hypothesize; give some ideas about why it cares about the current date.
ComboFix, if you’ve not heard of it, is a utility that basically fixes a combination of known malware side effects. So, if your machine has been infected by malware and you don’t want to (or can’t) take care the extreme step of reformatting and reinstalling your machine, ComboFix is one of those tools you might have in your arsenal that will go in and look and clean up as much as it can after the malware’s been removed.
Why might it care about the date? Well, malware’s always changing. What you really want to make sure you have is the most recent version of a tool that deals with malware. Be that anti-malware software or the databases that it uses or a utility like ComboFix.
Old software vs. today’s problems
If you have, say, a six-month old version of ComboFix, it’s not going to be fixing the things that they’ve detected in the most recent six months and as we know, the antivirus and antispyware arena is always changing; there’s always something new.
So it makes sense to me that ComboFix might say, “You know what, I’m kinda old. This copy of ComboFix is kinda old. You might want to go get another copy, an updated one to make sure that you’re actually fixing everything that the updated copy would know how to fix.
