Topic: Spybot

[daveeb]

Just used spybot and it found 72 varmints on my pc (adaware didnt find any). some of them looked quite serious including several gator applications and numerous altered registry keys.

my questions are

 why the difference between adaware and spybot ?

would zone alarm alert me if any of these things were trying to access the outside world ?

should i trust spybot and remove the miscreants it found    

[Simon]

Not sure what the real difference is, but Ad Aware and Spybot often find things the other doesn't, hence the advantage of using both.

I have never had any problems letting Spybot remove stuff.  Obviously, if you have programs which rely on Adware / Spyware to run, they won't work if Spybot does it's stuff, but then you're probably better off looking for alternatives anyway.

Not sure about ZA.  It should warn you if a program is attempting to access the internet, but some spyware are just tracking cookies, so ZA won't tell you about everything.

Hope that helps, but a proper techie would probably advise you better.  

[Sandra]

Dunno

Maybe

Yes


Not sure why these things happen but best to take a belt and braces approach sometimes  

[Simon]

Sandra, I wish you'd stop being over technical!  

[chorleydave]

Hi, Dave.

Do yourself a favour.  Run AdAware and Spybot a couple of times to remove the nasties, and then install Spyware Blaster.  It stops nasties from ever being installed in the first place.  Since I installed it and first ran it, neither Adaware or Spybot have picked up a single item of spyware.

Hope this helps.  

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

[daveeb]

Thanks everyone and dave i'll install that  

[daveeb]

Installed spyware blaster but got runtime error 339

MSCOMCTLOCX or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid  

[chorleydave]

I forgot to mention, It's always missing.  If you scroll to the bottom of the page, the installation file is there.  

[daveeb]

Thanks Dave