Posted on 12/19/2004 11:21:08 AM PST by Don@VB
What are the best Anti Spywear applications?
(Excerpt) Read more at pilotonline.com ...
AdAware and SpyBot are both free. Just Google the names.
;-)
"
For freewear, go to the Salvation Army. For sharewear, get a roommate.
Check out my FR homepage. I've got some useful informatin there.
Use Firefox and Thunderbird.
Used to get hundreds of spyware hits when I used IE. I get, on average, 3 per scan now.
Word. These two should work for the average users. You should use both as no one program catches everything. But if you have teenagers are are an active or indescriminate downloader (think Kazaa), you may need more robust protection. Here is one of many sites that will give you an overvierw. http://www.download.com/Spyware-Center/2001-2023_4-0.html?tag=dir
The best I've found (but not free) is Giant Antispyware from Giantsoftware.com
Noticed on thier website just now that Microsoft bought them on Dec 16.
You might still be able to find the demo download somewhere. Works for 15 days.
Hmmmm....not using Windows?
It's a radical step, but some have taken it. Depends on what you need.
You can try Linux from a bootable CD, see if it works for you. I'd be the first to admit, it's not for everyone.
Lavasoft's Ad-ware Personal SE, Spybot's S&D Search and Destroy and Javacool's Spywareblaster all take the prize and they're all free. The first two are scanners that detect and remove spyware from the computer and the reason one ought to have both of them is in case on scanner catches something the other misses. Spywareblaster is a preventive application that prevents the bad stuff from every being installed by inoculating your Internet Explorer and Mozilla browsers. The simplest means of keeping out spyware is to get Eric L. Howes' Spy-ad IE, which is a simple registry patch that adds thousands of malicious sites to the restricted zone, preventing them from ever installing unwanted software behind your back. It is also free.
http://www.free-av.com/
This has been working very well for me.
A good anti-trojan program is also recommended to look for stuff anti-virus scanners ignore. I run Ewido Security Suite and the plus version with real-time monitoring and automatic updates is worth every penny. http://www.ewido.net
Oddly enough, that program has caught several trojans that tried to hit me from websites.
Spybot has alerted me to numerous things that tried to install themselves from apparently "reputable" websites, as well.
The weirdest occurrence was when I was downloading a mouse driver from Logitech.
Spybot cheerfully announced that a "keylogger" was trying to install itself.
I have no idea what Logitech is up to, with that.
Correction;
I was downloading a -keyboard- driver.
Duh...:-P
Free trojan scanner;
http://swatit.org/
Seems to be adequate.
You have to instruct it to ignore harmless downloads from reputable websites. That's what is called annoying you with a "false positive." ;-)
Which, according to today's news, has been bought by Microsoft.
I am a big advocate for spybot and it works well for most spyware. But once I got a mess of spyware that spybot wasn't finding so I purchased Pest Patrol and I find that it does a better job in releasing updates for the latest spyware.
The website's been shut down as it transitions to life as a Microsoft subsidiary.
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