Monday, May 09, 2005

New Tool to Battle Spyware

I talked with my old friend Darren Patoni who is an IT professional and he let me know that Spybot - Search and Destroy is not enough.

I've had my Spyware pants down.

I ran the Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta software tool on my home computer last night and found 17 spybots that my other tool had missed.

Don't get caught with your pants down.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well... I too was very impressed about the number of "positives" M$ AntiSpyware Beta reported until I considered the following from Spybot-Search and Destroy's website:

[snip]
Which leads me back to the old topic. The press is reporting more and more about spyware, which is good, since people need to be informed about it. Many news articles also contain overviews over the detection rates of anti-spyware, which is good as well. But most anti-spyware companies, including many reputated ones, seem to entangle themselves in a fight for the best detection rate at the expense of quality. These days, it seems to be better to misflag some legit software, just to raise the rate.
With a dozen false positives about Spybot-S&D alone, I wonder what the real false positive rate about non-security related software would be? Security-related software should be on the prerelease test list of any anti-spyware maker and gets flagged anyway...
[snip]

Just for kicks, open Spybot-S&D. Under the Advanced Mode (choose it from the Mode menu), click on Settings. Under File Sets (on the left), check the boxes for "Usage Tracking" and "Tracks.uti".
Run Spybot-S&D again.
See if the total number of "results" don't better match those from M$ AntiSpyware Beta.

Ryan said...

You give legitimate pause, Jason. However, 9 of the spyware threats that the Microsoft tool removed from my machine were severe. Or should I say SEVERE. It made me feel so violated. I need to take shower.

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