Practically speaking, if your original antivirus software is always kept updated and its real-time protection is working fine, MSRT won’t find anything in the vast majority of cases. The effectiveness of MSRT as a secondary scanner made Microsoft include “ Windows Defender – Limited Periodic Scanning” feature into Windows 10. The MMPC blog announced that out of the 500 million devices scanned every month, the MSRT identified and removed malicious programs from 1 to 2 million machines, even on those devices running antivirus software. It doesn’t detect spyware, nor does it replace your primary antivirus program’s real-time protection. MSRT, as a secondary scanner, is useful in finding and removing viruses, worms, and Trojans. Whereas the definitions used your antivirus product are vast - containing signatures for all or most of the malware ever released. Also, it scans for a specific, prevalent malicious software, which amounts to a small subset of all the malicious software that exists today.
But it doesn’t monitor your system real-time. MSRT is a tool to remove infections from the computer. What is MSRT and how does it differ from my AV program?
