Things like spyware, malware, spam, viruses, and the popularity of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan (although she was Hot in Mean Girls) all completely baffle me. I understand that everyone wants to make a buck, but I just don’t get how people can really sleep at night. Thankfully, for as much energy as the evil people put into developing their tricks, there is a lot of goodwill being done at the same time. Our old pal Jonas put together a roundup of several free anti-spyware tools, and it’s a good read (unless you are on the Microsoft Defender team, in which case you have some coding to do).
I run Windows Defender as well as Spybot S&D. I just wanted to point out that Spybot’s results can be a little deceiving. The only thing it tends to find is Tracking Cookies, albeit it does find between 15-20 of them each time I run it on my computer (about once a month). Then again, I don’t run my machine as an Admin, so I don’t get infected with the real nasty items. Running as a limited user is the real way to protect your computer.
I should probably point out that when I say “the only thing it tends to find is Tracking Cookies” in regards to Spybot S&D, I mean the over and above Windows Defender. By itelf, Spybot does an admirable job of finding spyware. I just find it unfair to judge antispyware based on purely on total number of items found as not all spyware “hits” are equal.
I don’t think all spyware hits need to be equal, rather it should get them all.
Frankly I don’t put any confidence in Windows defender as it is a band-aid for the problems MS should not have allowed to persist.
Any time someone tries to claim IE or OE are a source of most infections, someone else will come along as mention “it must’ve been the user’s fault” as if that dismisses all the other times too which it does not. MS needs to stop trying to thrust advanced features on users that don’t expressly need them and tighten down these two primary point of infection by removing the ability to run the code, not trying to side-step around the problem instead.
I don’t want to find a virus the system has already caught, I want the mechanism (feature) used to get infected in the first place to be shut off, not a temporarily patch which will only stop that one exploit.