Spyware and Adware Threats
Every week I read article after article talking about
spyware and how to combat this ever increasing threat. Some
users have a lot more trouble with spyware and adware than
others. I suppose we could spend a lot of time analyzing how
the spyware and adware is introduced onto the system, but I
honestly believe it would be an exercise in futility. Users
are users are users, and even if they knew what actions they
perform are allowing spyware and adware proliferation, the
chances the behaviors are going to be modified on any type
of consistent or permanent basis is unlikely. I think
companies and spammers rely on that behavior and use it to
their advantage to infect more and more systems.
A week doesn't go by that I don't receive a number of
e-mails asking whether or not it's really necessary to use
some sort of program to combat the constant deluge of
spyware and adware. Is it truly necessary? I don't know if
it is or not. Judging from an article on ZDNet called
Study: Anti-spyware market to boom in 2005 [09052011 link
removed] it seems that
may be the case. The article states that, "Sixty-five
percent of businesses--big and small--surveyed by
Forrester Research said they plan to put money into
protecting their systems from malicious and prying software
programs in 2005." If it's that big a problem in business
situations, you can pretty safely rest assured it's an even
larger problem on home systems.
Most of the users that write also want to know what programs
I recommend and use on my systems to combat spyware and
adware. What I 'recommend' is that you read reviews of
programs designed to combat spyware and adware and then make
an informed decision about what you feel will work best in
your particular situation. At the time I wrote this article
I was using four different products on my systems:
- Ad-Aware SE
- Spybot - Search and Destroy
- Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1 [ This application is
no longer available. Replaced by Windows Defender ]
- Pest Patrol
Just out of curiosity, I loaded all four programs onto a
system running Windows XP Professional that doesn't see a
lot of use and ran a scan using each of the four programs. I
didn't allow any of the programs to 'clean' or 'fix' any of
the potential problems they identified. Once a scan was
complete, I closed the program and proceeded to the next
program, allowing it to scan the same drive to see what was
identified.
I want to make it clear that the results of this very
rudimentary test are not meant to pit the applications
against each other. Each application has strong and weak
points and this is merely one scan on one system. It has
been my experience that problems one application identifies
may be routinely skipped over by a different application.
That's precisely why I don't use just one application. Feel
free to look over the screen captures below and see what was
identified by each application.
Ad-Aware SE by Lavasoft
Spybot - Search and Destroy
Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware (Beta 1)
[ This application is no longer available.
Replaced by Windows Defender ]
eTrust™
PestPatrol® Anti-Spyware
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