Can you trust your Spyware?

[mjp28]

Can You Trust Your Spyware Protection?

Why Your spyware scanner may not catch some adware programs.

 

Andrew Brandt

From the July 2005 issue of PC World magazine

Posted Tuesday, May 31, 2005

 

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,...n053105X,00.asp

 

The next time you run a scan with your anti-spyware tool, it might miss some programs. Several anti-spyware firms, including Aluria, Lavasoft, and PestPatrol, have quietly stopped detecting adware from companies like Claria and WhenU--a process called delisting. Those adware companies have been petitioning anti-spyware firms to delist their software; other companies have resorted to sending cease-and-desist letters that threaten legal action.

 

In most cases it's difficult for customers to determine whether their anti-spyware tool has delisted anything and, if so, which adware it skips.

"When a spyware program gets delisted, users won't be aware of its presence," says Harvard law student and spyware researcher Ben Edelman. The practice, he says, "offers spyware makers a new lease on life, letting them keep users who otherwise would have removed their software."

 

 

Degrees of Spyware

Of course, some spyware apps are worse than others. One spyware program may make severe changes to your computer's settings, while another merely displays ads.

 

Claria and WhenU are making the case that their adware programs don't resort to illegal tactics, such as exploiting security holes, to install themselves. And though this software can be annoying, adware developers argue that merely being listed in an anti-spyware scanner's database tarnishes a company's reputation by linking its relatively benign adware application with far more harmful and intrusive spyware programs.

 

According to Avi Naider of WhenU, though some other adware companies will track your Web meanderings and sell that data, WhenU's privacy policy doesn't permit it to track the search queries that users type or the Web pages that they browse..............MORE IN ARTICLE...........

[Andavari]

A good example is:

Buy a Kodak digital camera, install the EasyShare bloatware, oh look it installs BackWeb Lite as the updater component, those sneaky software developers, can't fool me or my firewall. Ad-Aware doesn't detect BackWeb Lite. Spybot SD partially removes BackWeb Lite, however with a little manual labor searching the disk and registry it can be completely removed.

[DjLizard]

Ad-Aware doesn't pick it because it's not really spyware, and Spybot detects it (but leaves it unchecked by default) because it's not really spyware. It's just annoyware, like weatherbug

[Eldmannen]

Interesting article.

 

Ofcourse you cant trust your spyware cleaner to 100% clean your computer. They are tons of spyware and new spyware is developed all the time, and there probably is alot/some spyware less known than others highly-known spyware.

 

Nothing is 100% secure, nothing is fool proof there is always a risk with everything you cant expect it to be detect 100% everything.

[DjLizard]

I've got four words for you (one of which isn't really a word) :

a lot

not "alot"

[agumon]

Can You Trust Your Spyware Protection?

cannot be 100%... just like antivirus software... spyware removal tools rely on definations to detect spyware... so it require sometime for the definations and removal method to be develop... and spyware writers are so fast that they can write many spywares in a day... and typically there are too many of them...