Few years ago people will always recommend ad-aware & spybot but since they have become too popular, malware writers have targeted these specific programs; making it the norton/mcafee of the malware protection world.

Personally I have good results with WebRoot SpySweeper and Spyware Doctor but these two are commercial products. One of the best free malware protection I come across is AVG Anti-Spyware. Despite the name, it can also find and remove trojans.

But some of us needed more protection because we always visit some dangerous websites (hacking, porn, warez) that we needed a real-time malware protection. Windows Defender is an easy to use program but it only runs in XP & Vista. Thanks to Spyware Terminator, Windows 9x user can also benefit from real-time malware protection.

Sorry if I misunderstood some of you by saying both programs are targeted. It is more of a social engineering thing, make a copy of those programs but doing the opposite thing.

Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware

A lot of these programs copies and even steal the database of Spybot & Ad-aware making it their own, some even put spyware themselves. Gullible users will never know what hit them if these so-called anti-spyware cleverly change the database of spybot & ad-aware.

Us advanced users know how to deal with this but what about the majority of them who just click click click? Sad to say but that's the price of being famous.

p/s oh britney why?

My PC have 2GB RAM and Spyware Doctor alone used 200+ MB of memory. Didn't feel any lag but for an antispyware to suck up so much juice, hell even Firefox didn't use that much ram. I'm not surprised it slowed down many underpowered PC.

Sorry, I uninstalled it and never to be installed again.

After messing around I personally put the ranking now like this:

1. SuperAntiSpyware
2. Malwarebytes
3. Ad-Aware 2008

spybot & spyware terminator detection is so poor it's sad.

prevention is better than cure so my ranking for protection:

1. Comodo BOClean < user friendly
2. ThreatFire < too sensitive but still good

there's this beta version of Avorax Shield, quite good but still in beta. hope it be stable soon.

ooo yeah don't forget hijackthis hehe

Malwarebytes is also my favourite, along with TDSS Killer from Kaspersky.



Many spyware nowadays comes from fake antivirus, sad

1. https://www.malwarebytes.com/
2. https://www.superantispyware.com/

This post has been edited by havuk: Feb 1 2020, 03:29 AM