AutoIT: Automate multiple virus scanners?

I'm very curious about this program AutoITscript. It seems to offer a low tech way to automate Windows tasks for you if you sit down and learn their scripting language. It is supposed to be able to run executables and even send keystrokes or mouseclicks.

https://www.autoitscript.com

I'm considering the idea of learning this to automatically run Virus Scanners in sequence. At the moment, I've been interning at a PC Shop and Virus Cleanup is a common task so something like this seems like it could be very convenient.

I'm just wondering if there might be potential problems I might be missing. It does seem that just scripting several Virus Scanners to remove things automatically might have a small risk if there is a False Positive and a legit program is removed. Maybe if that happens, the program could just be let out of Quarantine?

Anyway, I'm about to experiment with this so I'll post any results.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Qord

Autoit is great for automating things. I use it at work for automating the installation of QuickBooks. Qb offers very limited options for installation with our licensing agreement, and autoit was what allowed me to install it in an entire computer lab with minimal work on my part. It even took care of the convoluted license validation that has to happen on the first run of the program after installation.

What you want to do is very possible, but will take a little while to get right. You could choose to either read what's on the screen or to our read into the gui window and look at what window options are available at that time. The tough part of reading the screen coordinates, colors, and words is that it would be pixel dependent meaning that you'd need the exact same screen resolution as the machine you write the program on. If you wrote it on a machine with 600 x 800, you'd need the same resolution when you run it. This is the quickest way to write autoit scripts, but this resolution thing can turn into a pain in the butt quickly.

netsysllc

Many AV products have command line options which would be a better way to go. One issue you will run into is most AV products have to be installed and installing multiple AV products can make a system unstable. If you want multiple AV the best solution would be something like MetaScan which can use many AV scan engines in one product. There are also community made tools that can run multiple malware scanners like Tron

VIDEODROME

Thanks for the feedback. I don't have a strong programming background aside from a Linux class with introduction to BASH scripting. So far, I've waded into this and managed to get SpyBot to run, do Updates, and then close. It would be a 'Smarter' script if it detected the state of the program before moving forward, but I've just made it Sleep between steps so that it doesn't jump ahead before it's ready. This might depend a lot on how much of a command line interface these programs have and sometimes that varies between free and paid versions.

I'll also checkout TRON.