Mirage Anti-Bot is a compact antivirus tool which aims to prevent you from accessing websites infected by the ZeuS, Palevo and SpyEye bots.

The program is fairly straightforward, in theory at least. The key point to remember is that you must launch it as an administrator (right-click the shortcut, select Run As Administrator). Then just click the Update button, and the program will download the abuse.ch blocklist (a major list of infected domains) and update your Windows HOSTS file accordingly, effectively preventing any browser you might run (or any other internet software) from reaching the malicious sites.

There are also a few small extras. Mirage Anti-Bot can log attempted accesses to blocked sites, for instance, perhaps helping you to see if it's doing anything useful. And if you'd like to prevent your kids from accessing a specific domain or two then you can add those sites to the list, too.

The program has significant limitations, of course. Mirage Anti-Bot isn't trying to detect malware on these websites, for instance, it's just blocking domains on a secondary list: if you try to visit an infected site which hasn't made it to the abuse.ch blocklist yet then the program won't be able to help you. So Mirage Anti-Bot is no substitute for a full antivirus tool with proper real-time browsing protection.

You also have to remember to run the program as an administrator, because if you forget then it doesn't seem to realise there's anything wrong, and still claims it's updated your HOSTS file even when nothing's happened at all. The simplest approach is probably just to tweak its shortcut accordingly (right-click, select Properties > Compatibility, check "Run this program as an administrator").

Still, once we'd sorted this out, the program worked well. Mirage Anti-Bot's simplicity means you'll be able to run it alongside your existing tool without any conflicts. And with the program using barely 7MB of RAM on our test PC, it's a reasonable choice to provide an extra layer of protection for your system.