Abstract: The subject disclosure is directed towards protecting virtual machines on guest partitions from malware in a resource-efficient manner. Antimalware software is divided into lightweight agents that run on each malware-protected guest partition, a shared scanning and signature update mechanism, and a management component. Each agent provides the scanning mechanism with files to scan for malware, such as by running a script, and receives results from the scanning mechanism including possible remediation actions to perform. The management component provides the scanning mechanism with access to virtual machine services, such as to pause, resume, snapshot and rollback guest partitions as requested by the scanning mechanism.

Abstract: Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to removing malware from a computer system. In aspects, an anti-malware engine detects malware and writes a tool onto a storage device. The anti-malware engine disguises the tool to make it more difficult for malware to detect that the tool is on the storage device. In addition, the anti-malware engine encrypts and writes remediation actions to be taken by the tool to the storage device and requests that the computer reboot. After rebooting, the computer executes the tool which takes the remediation actions including removing the malware.