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Anti-virus and Anti Spyware Software Undergo a Revolution - Don’t Buy Anything Yet

Posted on 19 December 2008 by D.Williams

Visit: PC-Tools - Download Free - HIGHLY Recommended By Me!

In this article I am going to answer the following questions:

1) What is the nature of the threat?
2) What are the variations of that threat?
3) What are the underlying forces driving the threat?
4) What solutions are available?
5) How can you investigate the quality of those solutions?
6) What did I select for my office computers?

A recent virus/spyware outbreak emergency in our office prompted the writing of this article. I hope my experiences can benefit others. Please read further for your own protection since the things you used to know are changing.

If you’re like me, you’ve got at least a few different Anti-Spyware, Virus, Trojan, Rootkit, Adware, Malware (did I miss anything?) packages. The anti-virus / anti-spyware market has been getting progressively more difficult to figure out over the last year. The number of packages, the number of approaches to the problem and the number of new threats have been increasing exponentially.

When you add firewalls to this equation, the number choices facing the consumer becomes overwhelming.

Qestion: What’s driving the growth of both sides (the creation and the protection) of the market?
Answer: You can make a lot of money infecting peoples computers.

A Wake Up Call - Here is a list of some of the things that spyware/malware/virus gangs are doing through the use of this technology and the real risks your face while on the internet:

1) Creating an army of PC’s which can be used to send a massive volume of spam advertising without any of the PC owners knowing they are involved. This gets around blacklists and spam prevention mechanisms used at internet service providers and email services providers. It also gives the operator of this network of PCs a degree on anonymity. Spamming people is illegal and this is one way to get away with it. Several groups have spammed 400 million times a day and if the offer they are advertising (usually a scam) gets accepted by just 1 in a 20,000 people, the daily profits can be in the millions of dollars per month.

2) Steal personal information. They’d love to be able to use your eBay, Paypal, bank account and other online connections to further their scams. Some simply harvest the information and sell it to third parties who use it to directly defraud the victims.

3) Steal commissions from online sales. When you go to a website that sells something or promotes a product, your computer will have a cookie placed on it that will identify who should get a commission from any sales. Some malware simply replaces all the cookies for popular sites with the cookie ID of the hacker.

4) Redirect searches - When you search using a search engine, it is possible that you are seeing things that do not originate from the website you think you are on. They can do this by telling your computer that www.google.com lives at an address that they own. They can get commissions and website traffic from these sources.

4) Redirecting websites, such as your bank - You could go to your bank account website and see your bank, log into your bank and even use your bank and not really be at your bank. A third party could be in the middle of the conversation and could alter what you are seeing or doing or could simply gather the information for re-sale to scammers.

The scammers will never be beaten, there is simply too much money to be made! It’s a war you can win if you are well prepared. The scammers will happily feed on the 90% of the market who are uninformed and unprepared.

Equally the Anti-Virus, Anti-everything industry has been confusing consumers and making a lot of false claims about their products effectiveness. We’re going to help you sort through that by empowering you to do your own quick research based on third party testing.

Let’s solve these problems through a quick education without all the fluff and marketing you’ll find in the advertising.

Here is a list of the usual threats that you face as you use the internet

Virus - A virus is a program written to cause mischief or damage to a computer system. A mild virus might only be a slight nuisance, or even amusing. However, most viruses do damage, whether to your files, your registry, or even your hardware.
Spyware - Spyware is computer software that is installed on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s use of the computer, wether online or offline editing a spreadsheet.
Bots - A botnet is a group of bot infected PCs that are all controlled by the same controlling party. They can then use them to crack codes, send spam or perform other tasks without the owners knowledge or consent.
Trojans - Software that appears to perform or actually performs a desired task for a user while performing a harmful task without the user’s knowledge or consent (this includes some phone products that are marketed to fix these problems!)
Malware - The word Malware is composed from the words “malicious” and “software”. This is a collective term for all types of damaging software such as Trojans, Spyware or Viruses
Adware - A form of spyware that collects information about a user in order to display advertisements in the Web browser based on the information it collects from the user’s browsing patterns. Frequently this is installed in free packages such as screensavers or free software utilities.
Rootkits - A program (or combination of several programs) designed to take fundamental control of your computer. This usually includes a set of software tools used by a third party after gaining access to a computer system in order to conceal the altering of files or system settings.

Everyone can simply Google for anti-vuris and anti-spyware products and find lots of solutions that claim to be the “Total Protection Solution”. Don’t believe the hype!

Instead of trying to figure out all their claims go to some of the third party testing websites that certify these products are you’ll find some pretty shocking things about heavily marketed and ‘well respected’ software packages!

The first site you can check out is ICSA Labs. This highly respected lab is used my all major vendors to test and verify their products. Many procurement contracts specify that the product must have this labs certification

Here we get to the interesting part! If all these products can detect the problem, how many can actually clean them?

So you’ve probably noticed that a lot of software that detects virus’s well, cannot clean what they detect. Somehow the manufacturers have forgotten that in their website marketing claims.

For even more dirt on this industry go to this (my favorite) third party certification lab is Virus Bulletin famous for their VB100 certification.

FREE registration on their website is required to view the complete test reports - REGISTER HERE - The results are a real eye opener as you quickly see that some of the most famous products are a waste of time and some of the lesser known products are showing a lot of strength and innovation. You simply must view this report before you buy any protection software for your computers or office. Take a moment to check it out. You will thank me.

Now in the fine tradition of saving the best for last, PLEASE GO HERE RIGHT NOW AND SEE the latest ratings by VIRUS BULLETIN - NORTON, MCAFEE AND BITDEFENDER are not in the top 50%!

First I tried to understand why my Norton 360 was failing to protect my systems. Then I started to downloading FREE tools that look pretty good and I am sorry to report that none of them helped our particular office virus outbreak. In fact, none of them could detect the problem. They may help some people, some of the time and they might well help your situation, but for us it was useless.

I downloaded Kaspersky, Mcafee, Avast, Panda, NOD32, Pc-Tools Spyware Doctor, Adaware, Antivir and others. I installed the free trial and again, the problem persisted.

Spyware Doctor was very impressive in that it detected an additional problem that none of the other packages saw and it cleaned it perfectly. It did not however clean our original problem.

The rest was a wash. I am disapointed that none of the software I tried actually worked. It should be much easier than this, especially considering anti-virus and anti-spyware vendor’s claims!

I kept installing different products until one finally cleared up my problems.

What Did I Finally Install and What Finally Killed Our Virus and Spyware Outbreak?

I licensed Symantec Endpoint Protection and PC-Tools Spyware Doctor.

Visit Now:

They both found a cleaned up additional problems on each of our systems. It’s been 4 months and everything has been perfectly clean. I have continued to try other software as they come out to see if there is any virus / spyware / malware / trojans / rootkits we may have but not see and none of the additional packages have found anything at all.

Conclusion: The solution we implemented works like magic. We’re completely satisfied with the results and the cost of the software was easily offset by never having to deal with the problem again.

I hope my experiences can help you choose a correct strategy for your computer or your home office.

I welcome your questions and comments.