Viruses vs Spyware and Adware

Just three, four years ago one of my biggest worries other than a system security breach were virus infections. Just by having a working and properly configured Symantec or McAfee installation I was confident enough not to think about a virus infection too often. And I hardly ever had a virus infection on my network and if it did happen, in most cases it was because the client had problems updating the virus definitions or was never updated.

That was then. How things have changed since then. Gator was installed on your computers because users did not read the license agreement of the software it was bundled with. Then the adware and spyware started getting more aggressive and harder to remove. Simply using the Add/Remove Control Panel applet was not enough any more.

Cleaning a computer from a virus infection usually takes much less time and is much easier than removing adware and spyware. It is not because spyware is more sophisticated software but because spyware removal is still a fairly new thing in the computer world. AdAware , SpyBot and now Windows Defender (formally Microsoft Antispyware) are very good applications but in the event of a serious infection you will find yourself using 2 or even 3 of the mentioned applications. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The early betas of Microsoft Antispyware were the weakest: it simply did not work when the computer was infected with much spyware (it seemed that the software’s user interface reliance on the Internet Explorer ActiveX control is what killed it).

Personally I find the latest Beta 2 of Microsoft Windows Defender to be enough to power users, while those, who have little computer experience, will come across spyware that will get around it with ease. The difference is that more experienced users have a better understanding of which sites to visit and which look suspicious. Unfortunately, the software seems to cause more problems on a healthy system than the early beta versions of the software. I was experiencing so many problems with the software that I decided to uninstall it on virtually all the computers I ran it on.

AdAware is still my recommendation for computer users that do not have much experience, as it is the easiest to use, however I prefer to use SpyBot on my computers. SpyBot is a great tool but could use some improvements in some fields such as: automatic updates (these tend to fail on infected systems leaving the database pretty much empty and calling for a reinstallation), real-time protection (the programs installed with the software pretty much inform you what happened without actually protecting you…)

I would recommend that users check out each piece of free software and decide which meets their needs. Users with more computers skills might like SpyBot for the fact that it does not "integrate" itself as much with Windows as Microsoft Windows Defender does while other users may feel that Microsoft Windows Defender and AdAware fit their needs better.