The best Spyware protection software?

Spysweeper from Webroot? This is not for viruses, but for adware, Trojans, spyware, malware, etc. My first experience with spy sweeper was a few years ago when one machine I had, seemed to be using an extreme amount of CPU. It seemed to me to be some type of virus/spyware/adware. I was using a beta version of Microsoft’s onecare at the time to protect my pc. OneCare did not find anything. I tried to download a few other products but they didn’t find anything either. I figured why not call Microsoft since they were offering free support on the beta for one care. I did, after an hour or so of trying to detect the spyware OneCare could not the MS rep told me here, try this link and download SpySweeper it usually finds everything. I downloaded and ran it. Sure enough it found the spyware and removed it. Even since then I have been using spysweeper. Spysweeper certainly does a good job of finding items on your PC, the only problem is it’s shields sometimes seem to consume a large amount of CPU time for no obvious reason. On occasion when I see that happening I will disable the shields and only run sweeps when once in a while and when I need to. Generally this is one of the tools I turn to when nothing else can find a problem. Given a recent experience I will likely try the built in windows defender first and follow up with spy sweeper. You can buy it retail for around $29.95, or possibly cheaper online.

Viruses/Spyware they will happen to you. One package may not save you?

Recently one of my home machines contracted a Trojan/virus.  Given that we’re pretty careful about what we click on and all PC’s were protected (supposedly) by Norton Antivirus this surprised us.  We realized it when we got all of those fake warnings about having a virus and that the fake WinPC antivirus software would save the day.

 

It turns out Norton Antivirus 2009 did not detect it, even when I specifically scanned the file I found that was the Trojan.

 

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Kapersky and it’s scan did not find it but found a few other items on my pc.

I ran spysweeper it said it found the WinPC antivirus Trojan, I quarantined it but nothing seemed to happen (might have been because my subscription was expired, not sure.

Spysweeper does seem to find a lot of the items in this category of malware, I was surprised it didn’t remove it.

 

I updated windows defender from Microsoft and it found the WinPC antivirus Trojan and removed it.

 

I think the moral of the story here is nothing finds everything.  So it might be worth having pointers to the free scanners of many different products in case your machine gets into trouble and try a few of them to verify if you have any issues.

 

Make sure the links are from well known Antivirus/AntiSpyware vendors.