Good, Free Spyware Remover

[Gregory Pratt]

Help?

[G&T]

Ad-aware (lavasoft), and Spybot

Edited September 11, 2007 by G&T

[Texsox]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And Microsoft a distant third, but the easiest and the most features.

[Y2HH]

AdAware is kind of crappy -- misses a lot of real spyware and removes stupid stuff like tracking cookies while making normal people feel safe, when it's not really doing much.

 

SpyBot, however, is a very good (and free) spyware remover.

 

All that said, the best spyware remover is the spyware you don't put on your system. Don't browse wierd websites, don't click on links you don't know/understand, and don't open emails from yourself or other people with wierd subject lines...and you never have to worry about spyware.

[southsideirish71]

AdAware is kind of crappy -- misses a lot of real spyware and removes stupid stuff like tracking cookies while making normal people feel safe, when it's not really doing much.

 

SpyBot, however, is a very good (and free) spyware remover.

 

All that said, the best spyware remover is the spyware you don't put on your system. Don't browse wierd websites, don't click on links you don't know/understand, and don't open emails from yourself or other people with wierd subject lines...and you never have to worry about spyware.

 

I agree with your assessment, I would add that all of them pretty much suck in some way or another.

 

The problem in this space is its too new and too much competition. In the AV community the Mcafee, Symantecs, Trends and all share samples across the community so you get more of a 95% and up hit rate on most av detects. In the spyware community there is no such sample sharing. So you get only what they are seeing which maybe only a fragment of the code out in the wild. You see more of a 30 to 40% hit rate on the stand alone scanners. Then of course you have the wolves in sheep's clothing which are spyware popups that people decide to click on because it told them they have spyware. They click on it, it installs some crap program that gives them false results and in fact is spyware itself. This part of the security industry is a freaking mess at the moment.

 

The stay away from spyware infected sites is a nice idea, but in reality what is a valid site and what isnt. The obvious ones, like the flash games, porn, and other associated crap thats easy. But look at the Superbowl site that hosted a rougue javascript that was exploiting people visiting the site. That was a valid site, and it was an outside attacker exploiting it and using it to serve up its code. At blackhat I saw someone demo a flash based attack where someone would hit the myspace site with the flash animation for the profile and it would exploit and drop down some code. AThis whole thing is a mess.

 

 

Spybot and Adware are de-facto standards have ok hit rates. Also xblock by factime is another decent free scanner.

 

http://www.xblock.com/onlinescan.php

 

AVG is another one to try.

 

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/20/us/frt/0

 

Webroot is one of the better ones, if you could call it that. But it costs, but they have a free spyware scan. If it identifies something outside of tracking cookies then you have a plan of attack.

 

http://www.webroot.com/consumer/compare/fr...re.html?rc=4929

 

 

 

[Steve9347]

Spybot

 

there is no other rival.

[sox4lifeinPA]

stop looking at porn?

 

that might help.

[Gregory Pratt]

stop looking at porn?

 

that might help.

 

yer kyoot, and I'll take your advice into consideration after daddy finishes his reading, okay?

[sox4lifeinPA]

yer kyoot, and I'll take your advice into consideration after daddy finishes his reading, okay?

 

I have no idea what that means...but if you're NIFOTC right now, I'm gonna puke.

[Gregory Pratt]

I have no idea what that means...but if you're NIFOTC right now, I'm gonna puke.

 

LOL, well-played!