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An entire new
range of products and updates were used for
this review to take on the latest spyware
threats head to head. The group of products
used in this review included three paid anti
spyware tools consisting of - Max Secure
Software's Max Spyware Detector, Paretologic
AntiSpyware, and Stopzilla!; and
three free products-- Lavasoft's Ad-Aware
SE Personal Edition, Microsoft's Windows
Defender, and Safer Networking's
Spybot Search & Destroy.
These tests were
used to determine how these programs combat both spyware and its
less evil but incredibly annoying cousin
adware.
These two types
of online threats are often used
interchangeably but are really quite
different. Spyware in some forms can
be very dangerous and installs itself
quietly often downloading other unwanted
programs and sending out personal
information without your consent.
Adware on the
other hand, is to blame for all the annoying
popups, false error messages, and other
unwelcome advertising that is clogging your
PC.
In real world
terms spyware can be thought of as a stalker
quietly collecting your personal information
without your knowledge only to use it
against you one day while adware is like
telemarketers and door to door sales people
who barge into your life uninvited with
their sales pitch.
Spyware and
adware samples were collected and used to
infect a lab of 6 Dell computers and then each of the spyware removal programs
were tested to determine their ability
to scan, detect and delete the rogue files.
The
Results: Top Picks
Max Secure
Software's
Spyware Detector removed 96.2
percent of the spyware and adware infections
claiming the highest removal rate and
helping to make it the top pick among the
paid spyware removers. Equally
impressive is its
ability to quickly and accurately scan the infected PCs.
Using a patent
pending SmartScan technology, Spyware
Detector was able to complete a full system scan
in under 2 minutes (1:33) while Microsoft's
Windows Defender took an agonizing 1 hours 1
minute and 47 seconds to finish a full
system scan. The speed was so
astonishing (and frankly unbelievable) several scans
were run to verify the results.
More information will be included below.
Out of the
free anti spyware programs, no clear winner
emerged. If for whatever reason, you
don't want to pay for spyware protection,
your should definitely use more than one
free program to increase your chances of
adequate spyware protection.
The biggest
disappointment came from Microsoft's Windows
Defender. It managed to remove only
60% of infections and while this is the
lowest rate of removal out of the free
spyware removers the best performing free
anti spyware program faired little better
with Spybot only removing 70% of infections.
The Results: Eliminating Infections
To effectively
remove infections, spyware removers must be
able to detect and stop spyware processes
that are actively running in memory.
Translated from geek speak, what this
means is that at all times there are
programs and processes running on your
computer that you don't notice. These
are not like programs such as your e-mail
client, web browser or word processor but
rather things that must run in order for
your computer to function properly but go
otherwise unnoticed.
Creators of
spyware know that few people are aware of
such processes and are
very unlikely to figure out what they all
mean and do. This makes it easy for them to
slip rogue and infectious processes onto
your PC without drawing any attention. An
anti spyware program that does a poor job of
eliminating spyware processes running in
memory is next to useless as it will only be
able to detect the most basic of spyware and
adware infections.
Spyware Detector
was the only program that removed 100
percent of the running processes followed by
Paretologic Antispyware, erasing 91 percent.
Several of the
spyware programs used to infect the test
machines altered Internet Explorer's
home page, search page, browser helper
objects (BHOs) and toolbars, and Trusted
Sites Zone and each spyware removal
software's ability to correct these unwanted
changes were tested.
StopZilla! and
Spyware Detector did the best job of
detection and cleanup, removing 100 percent
of the BHOs and toolbars embedded in the test PC's browser, as well as reversing all
of the browser start- and search-page
changes. Paretologic Antispyware corrected 76 percent
of the BHOs and toolbars, but they failed to
completely deleted some of the files
associated with these programs.
In addition to
eliminating all BHOs and toolbars, Max
Secure Software's Spyware Detector
outperformed all other software tested in
detecting and removing commercial
keyloggers. These programs monitor,
record, and send out all of your computer
activity, web sites visited, emails and
instant messages, logins, credit card info
and pretty much anything else you type or
access on your computer.
Preventing
Future Outbreaks:
An increasingly
important component of spyware removal tools
is their ability to prevent future spyware
and adware infections.
This is
accomplished by using what monitors that
actively keep watch on your computer for
signs of files and processes that exhibit
suspicious behavior similar to known spyware
and adware programs. When such
activity is detected the process is killed
and an alert is sent to you to let you know
about the suspicious behavior.
Spybot,
StopZilla!, Spyware Detector, Paretologic
AntiSpyware,
and Windows Defender, all offer some
behavior-based protection. Spyware Detector
and StopZilla! were the most accurate at
detecting and alerting potential
spyware problems with Stopzilla! catching
70% of infections as they were installed and
Spyware Detector capturing an impressive
90%. Adaware SE Personal edition comes
with no real time protection capabilities.
Ease
of Use:
The next factor
reviewed was ease of use and how simple it
was to remove spyware from each system.
Once again
Max Secure's
Spyware Detector rose to the top.
Its interface is very clean and extremely
easy to use. One of the nicest
features of
Spyware Detector was the one click access to
their advanced support feature. By
clicking a single button you can
generate a copy of the spyware scan results
and send it directly to their spyware
removal technicians for analysis.
This made it
very easy to diagnose and remove the more
complex spyware infections on the test
machines. Within 24 hours a fix
specifically tailored to the spyware problems
was created. StopZilla! also offers this capability but it
was buried deep in their options and sub
menus making it difficult to find and easy to overlook if you were not
sure what to look for.
Even less
impressive was Spybot S&D. While the
basic default interface is indeed easy to use
and designed to make it as easy as possible
to scan and detect spyware problems several
of the more useful features are available
only in Advanced mode such as schedules
scanning, real time protection and automatic
live updating settings. It would be very
helpful is these items could be added to the
basic mode.
Saving
Time: Getting Back To Life As Usual
No matter what you do,
you can't get your time back so anything
that can automate and speed up complex,
tedious tasks is a good thing which is what
make spyware removers so great.
For the final
test how quickly each program
completed a spyware scan was measured. This was
done for each program's Quick Scan and Full
Scan capabilities.
To make things
more accurate each scan was run 5 times
for all the programs and in the process
uncovered something very interesting.
The more times
a scan is performed with
Spyware Detector, the
faster the scan completes.
Spyware Detector's quick scan was completed in
59
seconds. Impressive indeed but nothing
compared to Paretologic's Antispyware which
completed a quick scan in a mind numbing 12
seconds. Compare this with the next fastest
quick scan time of 2 minutes and 40 seconds
by Adaware-SE and the slowest time of 8:06
by Spbot S&D and you begin to wonder if
the program is actually doing anything.
Yet when tested the full scan, the same
results occurred. The initial scan took longer
but each scan thereafter was blazing fast
compared to the competition.
Paretologic's Full Scan took 1 minute and
12 seconds just edging out Spyware
Detector's scan time of 1m 33s. Next up was Spybot S&D at
8:06
and last place was Windows Defender at a snail's
pace of 1 hour 1 minute and 47 seconds.
The scan
times are so fast and disproportionate to
the rest of the field, videos of
the overall top choice, Max Spyware Detector
in action are included below demonstrating
how the scan times get faster with each
subsequent scan.
Note:
StopZilla has no ability to perform a system
scan at all and relies completely on real
time protection capabilities.
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