The first stable release of hightower.
hightower scans the processes running on your Windows PC and explains, in
plain language, what each one is -- flagging the unknown or out-of-place ones.
It is built for people who have no technical idea what is running on their
computer. New to this? Start with the beginner's guide (docs/GUIDE.md,
pt-BR: docs/GUIDE.pt-BR.md).
What it does
hightower scan --all-- every process with a risk verdict
(trusted/review/suspicious), category, and path, worst-first.hightower explain <name|pid>-- a plain-language write-up of a single
process: what it is, whether many copies is normal, expected vs. actual path,
and cautious advice.hightower scan --json-- the whole scan as JSON for scripts.- Three risk heuristics (path masquerading, unsigned binary, unknown process),
Authenticode signature checks, and an embedded known-process database. - Offline-first: no network, no telemetry, ever. Read-only: it never touches a
process.
Please read
hightower is an educational aid, not an antivirus. Verdicts are prompts to
investigate, not proof. Known limitations (signatures are embedded-only, no
publisher-name extraction yet, a small curated database) are documented in the
wiki.
Download
hightower-v1.0.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe (Windows x64) is attached below,
built automatically from this tag. It is unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn on
first run; you can also build from source with
cargo build -p hightower-cli --release.
Thank you for trying hightower.