Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions of values of his employers.
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Microsoft’s anti-spyware software is still in Beta, but having got a bit paranoid about such things lately, I installed it last night. I’m not so impressed by the results.
I knew I should have got a fairly clean bill of health because I’d run SpyBot last week, but I was still surprised by the result Microsoft kicked out, even after I’d updated to the latest definition files:
Nothing. Not a single piece of spyware on any of my drives, in my browser cache, or in the Windows registry. Well, I guess Microsoft probably knows best, but just to be sure I tried again - this time with AdAware…
Hmmm… three bits of spyware that Microsoft’s spyware detector, built specifically to work with Windows, let slip under the radar. Instead of deleting them, I ran another test - this time with SpyBot…
Six pieces of spyware!
I deleted them.
I know the Microsoft software is still in beta, but either it’s missing out on some important entries in the registry, or AdAware and, particularly, SpyBot, are being hyper paranoid.
Either way, I’d rather err on the side of caution. The Microsoft spyware killer will be gone by teatime.
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5 Responses to “Spyware… begone”
I think it’s not too bad. MS bought Giant Software and have basically just rebranded their product. I understand that Giant’s was regarded as one of the top few, and I suspect that some people have taken against this (not necessarily you Nik!) just because it’s Microsoft branded.
The flipside of your experience is what happened on my system. I ran Ad-aware (with latest definitions) removed all the threats it found, then installed Microsoft AntiSpyware, and it found threat Ad-aware hadn’t…
• Posted at 10:33 pm on January 16th, 2005 by Nick.The DSO Exploit is a well-known “false positive” reported by Spybot. Do a google on “DSO Exploit” to find about a hundred sites explaining this. The DoubleClick “spyware” is simply a cookie–it’s debatable whether cookies should be considered spyware (why aren’t all cookies spyware? why just DoubleClick?). So Spybot didn’t really find anything at all (just as Microsoft Antispyware didn’t find anything at all). I’d say that Microsoft Antispyware is one component of a multi-level anti-spyware regime, and that your system is probably pretty clean.
• Posted at 3:33 am on January 17th, 2005 by vince.It has some memory usage issues.
My wife and I share a computer. We each have our own user accounts on WinXP Pro. If we both happen to leave our accounts logged in, the spyware scan runs under both accounts at 2:00AM. Not so bad, except it grabs and holds over 1GB of memory and doesn’t let it go until the dialog box shown at the end of the scan is dismissed by both accounts. This starts giving me “out of virtual memory” messages and, worse, this memory use is not reported in Task Manager–it’s just gone.
• Posted at 1:30 pm on January 31st, 2005 by Al Everett.well i consider themicrosoft version a scam.i have 20computers 10 with MS and 10 with GIANT verytime run giant i find something but when i run MS nothingfinds.
• Posted at 11:26 pm on April 22nd, 2005 by Joshua thompson.Leave a Reply
The resident protecting process is far superior. It prompts the user if certain changes should be made (even for friendly programs).
The startup program analysis and current loaded process anlysis is superior.
• Posted at 1:19 pm on January 16th, 2005 by Someone Special.