What is NanoScan?

It's an "instant" scanner that searches for viruses, spyware and other threats. It can detect, in less than a minute, a huge number of threats that could be running on your PC right now. Actually, don't be surprised if it finds active viruses, spyware or Trojans on your PC, even if you have an updated antivirus.

NanoScan in figures:

• It detects over 900,000 viruses, spyware and other known threats.

• It also finds threats that have not yet been identified thanks to its TruPrevent® intelligent technology.

• It is downloaded and scans in approximately 1 minute.

• It takes about 400k (compared to 20-30MB taken by other virus scanners)

Why does NanoScan detect so much?

NanoScan's great detection capacity is mainly due to the new Anti-malware Collective Intelligence, a system developed by Panda Research and hosted on a network of datacenters (initially made up of around 100 servers). The pillars of this new system are:

• 1. Collection of data from the user community

  The system centrally collects and stores the behavioral patterns of programs, file traces, new malware samples, etc. This data comes from the Panda Anti-malware Community: all of the NanoScan and TotalScan users, the million users of Panda products with TruPrevent technologies (intelligent technologies for detection of suspicious files), specialists and other collaborators. This huge capacity to collect information provides greater visibility of the threats that are active on the Internet.

• 2. Automated data processing

  The system automatically analyzes and classifies thousands of new samples every day. To do this, an expert system correlates the data received from the community with PandaLab's extensive malware knowledge base. This system automatically returns assertions (malware or goodware) about the files sent by the community. This reduces to a minimum the need for manual intervention from PandaLabs engineers and multiplies the capacity to process information.

• 3. Knowledge shared across the user community

  This extra knowledge is delivered to users in the form of web services or updates of the virus signature file. The Anti-malware Collective Intelligence system has dramatically increased our detection capacity. At present, NanoScan detects over 900,000 known malware samples, a figure which grows by the minute.

• Intelligent scan

  Besides known threats, NanoScan can detect new threats not yet identified thanks to the TruPrevent® technologies developed by Panda.

How can it detect so much being so small and fast?

Unlike traditional antiviruses, NanoScan doesn't need to download a virus signature file, as it accesses the entire Panda knowledge base online.

This results in an extremely light scanner, which performs the scan in approximately one minute and detects much more than a traditional antivirus.