4 Comments

BHO Remover Review: Identify and Eliminate Malicious and Unwanted IE Helper Objects

Written by:  • Edited by: Bill Bunter
Updated Aug 30, 2010 • Related Guides: IE | Internet Explorer | XP
4

Spyware and legitimate programs can add component as Browser Helper Object in a browser and you might want to find out whether it’s a known safe BHO using BHO Remover.

Overview

BHO Remover is a standalone tool that will display the installed Browser Helper Objects in Internet Explorer. Using BHO Remover to identify and eliminate unwanted BHOs is easy to do. Find out how it works.

Installation and System Requirements
Rating Excellent

BHO Remover UI
click to enlarge
No installation is required to start using BHO Remover. The compressed BHORemover.zip contains BHORemover.exe and a readme.html files. Simply execute BHORemover.exe in XP, Windows Server 2003 or in Vista and you’ll be able to view currently installed helper objects for IE.

Options in Using BHO Remover
Rating Excellent

BHO Remover do not only list installed BHOs for IE browser, you can also:

  • Check online the status of Browser Helper Object. The program is using processlibrary.com to identify the status of BHO item.
  • Launch the properties of the helper object
  • Sort the view of BHOs by class name, company, BHO CLSID, version, file size, file path and installation date
  • Refresh the list of detected BHOs for IE

Performance and Usage
Rating Good

BHO Remover is easy to use tool to identify and eliminate a helper object but the program’s user interface is neat but you cannot adjust or maximize the UI so we don’t have to scroll from left to right when viewing the list of BHOs. BHO Remover will not detect

BHO Remover UI
click to enlarge
add-ons for Firefox.

I installed few programs that will add browser helper object for IE to test if BHO Remover will correctly identify the new BHOs. The programs I installed for this test are McAfee SiteAdvisor, LastPass and Cooliris for IE. The currently installed BHOs in IE8 are BHOs of Adobe Reader, Sun Java RE, Web of Trust and Download Guard for IE by Lavasoft. All items were detected by BHO Remover and it allows me to view their properties to continue identifying the helper objects.

If there’s malicious or unwanted BHOs for IE, BHO Remover will not highlight it but you have to use the Check Online feature and hope that processlibrary.com will identify it as bad or unsafe BHOs.

Tip: You can also use http://www.systemlookup.com/ to determine the status of any Browser Helper Objects, Toolbar or Browser Extensions.

Price to Value
Rating Excellent

Freeware and standalone tool.

Conclusion

BHO Remover is handy and easy to use tool. Recommended if you don’t have any programs yet to identify and remove unwanted helper objects in a browser.

Next Article »
We Also Recommend...

Comments

Showing all 4 comments
 
Donna Buenaventura Feb 23, 2011 8:34 PM
RE: BHO Remover Review: Identify and Eliminate Malicious and Unwanted IE Helper Objects
Hi,
It's because this article was published some time ago but was bumped only I think but did not have any edits.

What is safe I think is that while the article have bhoremover.exe, the link is correct and the vendor or software author's website will direct their visitors to new version of their program which is now rebranded as SpyBHORemover.

When this article was first published, BHORemover.exe is not for Windows 7 yet so I guess this is why they have new version with new name. And there was no malware detection in old version before and I think it should be considered as FP since the program is not malicious nor doing malicious thing - whether old or new version.

Thanks!

Regards,
Donna
IT Security Guy Feb 23, 2011 5:48 PM
2 different product names and/or versions
Please see the results here:

https://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=a50396e7e80e8483777cdabf09873772f1c82fe2911ad6994e1b0988c84db7ab-1298361725

You uploaded the setup file for SpyBHORemover, which would be correct for the link at the top of your review.

However, your review is entitled simply BHORemover, which is why it was in my search results when I was researching that product, which I had previously downloaded, but not installed, because it was flagged as malware by my AV.

Also, your article refers to BHORemover.zip, and BHORemover.exe, "The compressed BHORemover.zip contains BHORemover.exe and a readme.html files.", not the Setup_SpyBHORemover.exe file you scanned at VirusTotal:

This review is extremely misleading and should be renamed and rewritten to remove all references to BHORemover.exe or BHORemover.zip.

Both products are from http://securityxploded.com, however the BHORemover that I have is version 1.6.0.0 and the SpyBHORemover you scanned is version 3.0.0.0.
Donna Buenaventura Feb 23, 2011 10:57 AM
RE: BHO Remover Review: Identify and Eliminate Malicious and Unwanted IE Helper Objects
Nope. It is not infected. Latest scan result using virustotal service is 0 of 43 scanners found no threat on BHO remover. Please see the result after I uploaded today:
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=5bc7216f543b277c150b3840308f43bfd56732a22ecc3260b2b63c694e800513-1298476437

Regards,

Donna
IT Security Guy Feb 22, 2011 3:09 AM
Isn't it infected?
According to virustotal.com 11 of 41 scanners consider it malware infected.
 
blog comments powered by Disqus
Computer Security
FEATURED AUTHORS
Aaron R. Daniel Barros MD Weems Tom Olzak, CISSP
William Springer Karishma Sundaram Eli Misel PreciousJohnDoe
Most Popular Articles
Email to a friend