MS Releases Anti-Spyware Software

noel · Post by **noel** » January 6, 2005, 7:36 pm

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/securit ... fault.mspx

Only in beta for the moment. I downloaded it and ran it on my system. It seems pretty good, and much, much easier for the average user to make sense of than some of the other anti-spyware software I've seen. Thoughts?

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » January 6, 2005, 7:45 pm

pro side: an easy to use spyware (ie for my parents) is desperately needed in the marketplace

con side: probably massive security hole

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » January 6, 2005, 7:55 pm

Hmmm, I wonder how it stacks up with Search and Destroy and PestPatrol.

Is it free beyond the beta test period? I didn't see anything in the FAQ.

noel · Post by **noel** » January 6, 2005, 8:10 pm

Winnow wrote:Hmmm, I wonder how it stacks up with Search and Destroy and PestPatrol.

Is it free beyond the beta test period? I didn't see anything in the FAQ.

It's not supposed to be free after the beta is over, Winnow.

Voro, my parents were the first people I was thinking of when running it. I mean, my mom is the woman who when told I was going to burn some CDs she said (and I quote), "Why don't you see if you can sell then on Ebay instead?"

my mom!

Edit: Also Voro, I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment that this product will make anything less secure.

It's my opinion, that in the past at Microsoft, you had a group of people saying, "We need to make our OSes more secure!" and you had a different group of people (probably marketing fucks) saying, "If you do that, you'll make it harder to use, and we won't sell as many boxes!"

It's just my opinion, but I think with SP2, MS has clearly shown that they're far more interested in securing their OS than keeping the complexity down. They also seem to have worked very hard to present concepts like firewalls, updating, and the importance of anti-virus software to the 'average user'.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » January 6, 2005, 8:34 pm

Search and Destroy is free and pretty straight forward.

Pest Patrol finds the most stuff so I use that instead. Someone will do a comparison between the three and that will help.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » January 6, 2005, 8:51 pm

Hmmm when you read some of the articles, they are calling it Anti Virus software but it's Anti Spyware. Those are two different things.

Microsoft is merely responding to the demands of its customers and product support teams in releasing the detection and removal tool, Nash says. The company is not trying to replace antivirus software but instead provide a tool for the two-thirds of computer users who don't use it, he says.

This confirms it's just spyware removal.

Edit: it looks like the anti virus part will come later per aranuils post below.

noel · Post by **noel** » January 6, 2005, 9:14 pm

Winnow wrote:Hmmm when you read some of the articles, they are calling it Anti Virus software but it's Anti Spyware. Those are two different things.

Actually Winnow, it will be both. They've only released the Anti Spyware beta to date, but the anti-virus software is still forthcoming.

Edit: More info from another forum I read:

Microsoft bought out Giant Company (best anti-spyware out there - in a test against 19 other "top" anti-spyware tools, it scored very high percentage detection rates compared to the others which performed miserably. You can view the test results at http://spywarewarrior.com/asw-test-guide.htm) on December 15th or 16th. Or at least that's when the official announcement was made.

I was using a trial version of the Anti-Spyware software at the time and was planning on purchasing, but could not once MS announced the take-over. I also used their Spam Inspector product in the past and it is excellent.

As to the anti-virus thing with MS, they've been planning it for a couple years now. I know that they were looking at some Romanian anti-virus product (RAV Anti-Virus by GeCAD) for a base from which to build their product. I had expected to see something anti-virus related when they started work on SP2, but alas, no dice. It would be nice to have an all-in-one integrated solution aside from Norton (invasive, bloated shit) and McAfee. Especially nice would be "free with OS purchase". Can't wait to hear the anti-trust folks go apeshit on that one.

Anyhow, yeah, glad to see that they've only taken a few weeks to get Giant's name off the software and start distributing it. It's a great product. It catches everything that a combination scan of Spybot and Ad-Aware will catch and also catches more than that. I recommend using it if you have a Windows system.

[edit]Just installed the MS Beta version and it is seriously the same product so far. With any luck, MS will avoid making too many changes to it. But as of right now, it appears that the only changes they made were to name it Microsoft AntiSpyware and throw the tag Beta 1 on after that. The installation, setup, interface, scan and options are all unchanged.[/edit]

Kilmoll the Sexy · Post by **Kilmoll the Sexy** » January 7, 2005, 10:23 am

In regards to Spyware, there are some serious strains out now that none of the programs on the market will get rid of. I have encountered a few now that put mutiple applications in place to make sure they can re-install once you delete part of the spyware. There are even a couple out that will force your machine to do a system restore so you can't get rid of them. I did find a link to a site that is wonderfull for people who know their way around a system......

http://aumha.org/a/noads.htm

That link will launch to a site that actually runs a script to scan for the bad ones that won't be cleaned by Spybot, Ad-Aware, etc. I can verify that it works as I have now used it several times on machines that people have gotten a particularly nasty spyware called "transponder". Their main page, http://aumha.org/a/parasite.htm , is also pretty nice for giving links and other information about spyware.

Even if you are pretty knowledgeable, you will find some usefull links and tools from these sites. It has saved me some serious hours of work already.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » January 7, 2005, 1:20 pm

Kilmoll the Sexy wrote:In regards to Spyware, there are some serious strains out now that none of the programs on the market will get rid of. I have encountered a few now that put mutiple applications in place to make sure they can re-install once you delete part of the spyware. There are even a couple out that will force your machine to do a system restore so you can't get rid of them. I did find a link to a site that is wonderfull for people who know their way around a system......

http://aumha.org/a/noads.htm

That link will launch to a site that actually runs a script to scan for the bad ones that won't be cleaned by Spybot, Ad-Aware, etc. I can verify that it works as I have now used it several times on machines that people have gotten a particularly nasty spyware called "transponder". Their main page, http://aumha.org/a/parasite.htm , is also pretty nice for giving links and other information about spyware.

Even if you are pretty knowledgeable, you will find some usefull links and tools from these sites. It has saved me some serious hours of work already.

I was hit with some nasty shit at work once and this is the only thing that cured it:

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwsc ... cwshredder

It had to do with the cool web sites.

IMO, MS should offer it's Spyware and Anti Virus apps for free as it's only saving them lots of tech support grief and keeping customers happy. The new auto updates in SP2 are a step in the right direction.