What is Microsoft SMaRT? When you suspect malware on your machine you do one thing. You run a traditional anti-virus/anti-spyware scan. After scanning and cleaning if the machine is still displaying symptoms, what is your next step? Currently there is no solution/tool/answer for this problem. You are left 'trying' to identify processes, modules, aseps, infected files that may or may not be running on the machine. The problem is even more frustrating if the symptoms are determined to be caused by hardware failure and not malicious software.

That's the blurb for Microsoft's new Suspected Malware Auditing and Report Tool or SMaRT. This is what it it looks like: The idea seems to be to establish what software is kosher and what isn't, through a set of heuristics - unknown at this stage. Does this sound familiar? I think it does. It reminds me of so-called generic software, which looks for known malware behaviour. Microsoft's version seems to work by identifying software known to be good, and then flagging the unknown stuff. This seems to me like a risky idea. The 90-94% accuracy is impressive, but what if the false positive is a file belonging to a competitor? Microsoft could end up in very hot legal water over that. Or, what if the file is unknown yet crucial to the system operation? Some users may delete stuff flagged as unknown. Can't quite see how SMaRT will help against "rootkits" or Windows kernel extension malware either, as these are below the file system level and thus invisible to the tool. All in all, I'm not sure what Microsoft is trying to achieve with SMaRT - maybe it's a good idea to build up a database of "safe software", but surely there are better ways of doing than this? While it was still availiable as a clickable link,I tried to install the executable, SMarRTInstall.exe, but it seems to be a a weird mish-mash of HTML served up as a GIF image. That was about two weeks ago, and it still hasn't been made available. Hmm.