SpywareBlaster Not Recommended By MS

In this email reply to ? about compatiblity of SpywareBlaster with post XP OS like Vista and 7 and with post IE 6 browser, in particular IE8, it appears that MS thinks that SpywareBlaster is more overhead than help.

Is the response about the large number of registry entries that SpywareBlaster creates when the registry was never designed for so many a valid point? If one of the protections is removed e.g. Site Protection are the correspond registry entries removed



re: Any reason why"
Well there are several reasons ...

1) the entries (over 7,000) are not updated as often as needed, and
many of the ones that do exist are no longer valid, thus creating a
huge amount of invalid Registry entries. Which Microsoft NEVER
intended that so many entries would exist there in the Registry.

2) Windows Vista does NOT allow any new ActiveX installs or
any to run without first prompting the user. (XP doesn't do that)

When Spywareblaster first came out it was and still is a good program
however as time has progressed the type of malicious installs no
longer simply use ActiveX as a method of infection.

Mike Burgess
Microsoft MVP - Internet Security
"There's no place like 127.0.0.1"
http://www.mvps.org/...p2002/hosts.htm

 

I think you have misinterpreted the post as it has nothing to do whatsoever with MS. Also see
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=268752

 

That thread explains it well, but I'd like to add something more, which may or not reflect more users.

I deploy security measures according to what each user is capable of dealing with. I'm not talking about enterprise level, of course. In this scenario, they have no voice, at all!
But, taking as example some of my family members, I can't forget it's their systems. They can't be restricted from doing what they want to do. The same does not mean they aren't aware of the dangers. But, how will they know xyz website has no good intents? I tell them to be careful with websites that get orange or red ratings. So, if a website is rated with any of these two colors, they won't even enter the website. But, what if the website is rated green by quite a few or all known rating services, like say in www.urlvoid.com? Does that necessarily mean is safe? Not really.

Obviously, newest version of Internet Explorer also have other improvements like SmartScreen, which helps a lot. But, not enough.

So, a website is rated green and they enter it. They want to make use of something, which will require to install an activex. It doesn't matter if IE asks it under Vista or 7; they want to make use of that service (just an example), and so they will. Everything so far has told them there's nothing to worry.

What I want to mean is that, depending on the users, certain security measures are meant to, it may make all the difference in the end to use or not to use this or that measure.

As Cudni well said in the respective thread, it won't waste any resources. The way I see it, it's not an useless security application, at all.