7 free govt-approved tools that can protect your Android phones, PC from virus

If you were worried about being able to keep your Android phones and PCs safe from virus and bots, the government has seven free solutions for you. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has released seven tools as a part of the Cyber Swaccha Kendra (Botnet Cleaning and Malware Analysis Centre) that can protect your Android smartphones, PCs and other devices from botnet attacks. 

All these tools are being operated by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in collaboration with partners like Quick Heal, eScan etc.

In case you didn't know, botnet are infected devices that are connected and they are all operated in a coordinated manner to perform malicious activities. They are controlled by hackers to send spam, get unauthorised access, carry out DDoS attacks and steal data.

So here are the tools and where you can download them from:

1. Quick Heal Free Bot Removal Tool for Microsoft WIndows PCs

This tool comes from Quick Heal in collaboration with CERT-In. You can download it here.

2. ​Free bot removal tool by eScan Antivirus for Windows PCs

This tool is for Windows PCs and is provided by eScan Antivirus. You can download it here.

​3. eScanAV CERT-In Toolkit (this is for Android phones)

This toolkit for Android phones comes form eSCan and CERT-In and can be downloaded from the Google Play store and from here. 

4. USB Pratirodh desktop security solution

USB Pratirodh is a desktop security solution, which controls the usage of removable storage devices like pen drives, external hard drives, cell phones, and other supported USB mass storage devices. You can download it here.

5. AppSamvid

AppSamvid is a desktop based Application Whitelisting solution for Windows operating systems. This solution allows only pre-approved sets of executable files for execution. You can download it here.

6. Browser JSGuard for Firefox Web Browser 

Browser JSGuard is a browser extension which detects and defends malicious HTML and JavaScript attacks made through the web browser based on Heuristics. It alerts the user the very moment they visit any malicious web pages and provides a detailed analysis threat report of the web page. This just works on the Firefox browser and you can download it here. 

7. ​Browser JSGuard for Google Chrome

For Google Chrome users there is the Browser JSGuard. You can download it from here. This works only for the Chrome browser though.