ZeroSpyware

Discussion in 'other anti-malware software' started by hollywoodpc, Mar 6, 2006.

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  1. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    Wow ! Very kind . I was just trying to help a bit . Sweeeet !!!
    The detection rate and speed of scanning is nice . Removal engine working well also . Well , in line with other top AS programs .
     
  2. Devil's Advocate

    Devil's Advocate Registered Member

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    Strange, I thought you believed scanners (blacklisting) doesnt have a future?
     
  3. ErikAlbert

    ErikAlbert Registered Member

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    Strange indeed for you, not for me, but you don't know how I work and think and I don't have to explain myself to a stranger. :)
     
  4. Devil's Advocate

    Devil's Advocate Registered Member

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    Let me help you out. What you should have really said is...

    "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

    Walt Whitman
     
  5. ErikAlbert

    ErikAlbert Registered Member

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    FBMsoftware kept its word and I have a free license now of ZeroSpyware v3.4 until 2007.03.09.
    I hope HollywoodPC got it too. :)
     
  6. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    That is great Erik ! I did indeed . Those guys are really nice to deal with . A pleasant surprise based on alot of companies . So far , I love it ! I have only had it a few days but , I see no reason to drop it . Working side by side with a couple of other AS apps and it finds the same things . It does not scan as many files as some of the others but , I think I know why . Do not want to say yet as I need to look into this further . I have them looking at some screenshots to see . Scans fairly quickly too . Erik . Let us know what you think as time goes on . I think it is great they hooked you up . Good luck with it:thumb:
     
  7. ErikAlbert

    ErikAlbert Registered Member

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    OK HollywoodPC, I'm glad you got it too.
    According several emails, they have sent to me, ZeroSpyware isn't finished yet.
    They receive on a daily base an enormous number of objects, that need to be evaluated, partly automatic but supervised by a team.
    So we have to give them time enough to improve its detection rate and interface.
    In fact ZeroSpyware is the only scanner, that doesn't bore me.
    They all look alike and have similar features, but this one is different.
    Time will prove how good this scanner will be in the future.
     
  8. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    yep . That is the info i got . And , I agree totally with you . They do all look alike . This one is kind of nice to look at . They are really working hard on this . It already does a good job . It will be interesting where it will be in 6 months .
     
  9. sukarof

    sukarof Registered Member

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    Nice program. Nice GUI and easy to understand, lots of explanations of different threats.
    I hope this one is the best one out there, because then I once again confirmed my belief that I dont need any antispyware ;)
     
  10. SDS909

    SDS909 Registered Member

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    Be warned about this product. I had a abysmal experiance with it in early 2005. I installed the trial on a CLEAN formatted windows, off the network, and it discovered 4 pieces of spyware. A few friends discovered the same thing on their trial.

    I purchased it anyway, hoping for the best, and found it a rather unstable product, and I didn't like some of the activity it was doing on my PC. They were offering a "100% no questions asked refund policy", which I decided to use. Day after day, I waited, no refund came. I used their so-called "Live" support, which seems to link to the Phillipines at some sweatshop support company for many products. Always getting girls with names like "Anne" or whatever.. Always the same BS "Your refund is being processed.".

    Another 3 months passed, ignored emails, ignored POSTAL letters. I even did some deeper research and found out their parent company, which I contacted, and was ignored. When I tried calling I got an answering machine (probably in some guys basement) and never got a call back.

    Finally I took it public, and posted on a forum with 210,000 registered members and informed them of this, and was still ignored. I contacted the BBB and filed a report, which was ignored. I contacted the attorney general in my state, and filed a report, they informed me that to the best of their digging, this company is based offshores in some bananna republic and isn't subject to his enforcement.

    To this day, I never got my money back, and have never used the product beyond those first few weeks (when it crashed my machine constantly). As such, I cannot stress more directly that this is a product that should be avoided at all costs. Try to find some contact numbers or addresses on their site, and tell me if it is NORMAL for a legit business to try to hide all measures of contact from their customers?

    Sorry Zero, you created an animal when you screwed me out of my money.
     
  11. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    I know you hate the developers but , for others that might believe the off shore thing and the address thing :
    As for my personal experience , the live chat might be bad at times but , my experiences have been fair thus far . Interesting what the differences are in a year's time
     

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  12. SDS909

    SDS909 Registered Member

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    I don't buy it... Back when I tried to contact them, the best I could determine was that address was nothing more than a mail drop. Keep in mind, I DID send them snail mail as well, so I did eventually find their address. Even more funny, well over 12 emails to *ALL* of those listed addresses yielded ZERO replies.. ZeroSpyware is a big "Zero" in my book, and their little 90 day guarantee is nothing more than a SHAM.

    A year makes no difference at all when a company scams me out of my money, and then makes it all but impossible to contact them beyond generic "Female" named techs based in a Manilla sweatshop, and a mail drop at some $2 a month mailbox store where they don't even bother to read anything sent to them.

    Sorry, but the product sucks in my opinion, and the company at best, is questionable - and worse - is breaking the law with their bogus claims. Anyone using it can consider themselves using a questionable product, from a questionable company, with little to no credentials. You've been warned.
     
  13. The Hammer

    The Hammer Registered Member

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    I wonder if there is any way to either confirm or dismiss the controversy concerning this program and the company that owns it? Perhaps one of the Wilders designated spyware experts could comment or give the program a spin.
     
  14. Devil's Advocate

    Devil's Advocate Registered Member

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    I hope all this free stuff, doesn't warp objectivity.
     
  15. zerospyware

    zerospyware Registered Member

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    Hi SDS909,

    I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions here. Despite your opinion it doesn't make any sense for fbm to cheat you out of $29.95. Our representatives have strict instructions to approve any refund that falls within the 90 day guarantee without exception. There are several reasons for this:

    1. if you paid by credit card then you could contact your bank for a charge back or deny the charges. If this was an electronic download then you banks are tpyically very libaral on these charges. Here is what happens in this scenario. you get your money back, we get nailed with a $15.00 fine from the bank for a charge back. If you bought the software from an online campaign chances are we net less than $10.00 for the sale, and paid somemone like google or yahoo for instance $20.00 for the sale. And we start tallying a negative score for charge backs with our merchant account. If our charge back rate is too high then we lose the merchant account all together or have to increase our deposit by tens of thousands of dollars to keep the account.
    So, you get your money back and we lose an average of $35.00 and take a reptuation hit with our merchant account that in aggregate could cost us much more.

    2. We sell our product in some of the largest retail outlets in the US, and have worked to build relationships with press and security insiders. We are also releasing an Enterprise Product this month that we sell directly to corporations, purely based on our reptuation. The reputation hit that we take from the negative publicity of upset customers like yourself is far from worth it.

    Here is an inside scoop behind how actual Rogue or fly by night companies work. They cheat. they take shortcuts. They don't spend money to develop or maintain product, they include virtually no features. they don't update their database (in many cases they reverse engineer or steal someone elses database, and sometimes rebrand someone elses product without any permission). They don't offer money back guarnatees and they use false positives to encourgae a sale. They also generally don't offer 15 day trials. And they never offer 24/7 live support.

    Even if you felt like you had a bad experience with "Anne" or whoever you were talking to. We still have to pay her and we have a staff that covers a 24/7 shift to answer your questions. You could log on now or any other time to ask any of them any sort of detailed question about issues you are having and get them to spend time thoughtfully trying to solve your problem. This costs money, which is why typical fly by night operations skip this step alltogether. What would the point be? And how does offering 24/7 livechat support make it virtually impossible to contact a company? I wish more companies would be accessible by livechat. For the record.. FBM support only supports FBM products: Zerospyware, ZeroNetHistory, Zeroads. They work onsite next to the threat research team and are fbm employees.

    We update our database 2-3 times a week, and stay on top of the latest spyware.. Totally uncesseary if we were after the quick buck.

    As far as a sweat shop in Phillipines goes?.. Trend Micro has over 100 employees in the Philippines working on virus research. PeopleSupport has over 2000 employees in their call center in the Philippines as does E-tellecare. Gateway, Dell, America Online, and many other companies offer significant call center support from the Philippines, India and other locations.

    Look I'm truly sorry that you had a bad refund experience. We have several hundered thousand customers to handle. Despite our best efforts some customers fall through the cracks for a wide variety of reasons. None of which are policy. Is there anyone out there who hasn't had a bad support experience with a major company. AOL, Vonage, Sprint, etc..? I know I've personally lost tons of money and gotten the run around at some of the most well known fortune 500 companies in the US. It sucks but it doesn't make them disreputable.

    If you send me a private message with the email address you used I would be more than happy to pull up every record of every contact you had with the company either by email or livechat (yes we track it all) and figure out exactly what happened and why and give you a complete explanation as well as the refund you never received. I can also offer you a complimentary extension of another year on your Zerospyware subscription for your trouble. We have been working on improving the product none stop for several years, and I'm willing to bet that whatever issues you faced before have been cleared up.

    We have a large number of incredibly hard working and dedicated people at this company who have been struggling for many years to create one of the best products in the market place. I'm sure it feels good to lash out when you feel like you've been cheated. But honestly its the wrong target here. I'd like to know if you ever validated your false positives with our support staff, if you ever sent a diagnostic log? You may not have noticed but we have one of the most complete set diagnostic logs in the industry. Its not for show.

    If you take a look at the sheer number of features we have in our product. Real time spyware detection, Intrusion detection, Vulnerability scans, Start up registry management.... and the list goes on.. Why would any company invest in so much development to scam people out of money. It just doesn't make economic sense.

    We have a lot of hard working dedicated people at our company striving to deliver the absolute best product on the marketplace. Again... I'm sorry for whatever inconvenience you may have suffered. But lets try to put it to bed. The money you are owed is truly small in comparison to the signficant damage your continued resentment toward the company cost us and will cost us. Let me know what I can do to clear up the misunderstanding and to find out what happend to your case, so we can make sure to try to improve so that it doesn't happen again.

    Cheers,
    David
    fbmsoftware
     
  16. zerospyware

    zerospyware Registered Member

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    Hammer,

    Thanks for the suggestion. I was really looking forward to some of the security experts here actually trying the software and pitting it against some of the other favorites, then providing feedback and criticism based on first hand knowledge of the application. Were absolutely interested in seeing what people have to say about our product good or bad so that we can figure out how to improve it as we strive to be the best. But it does help when people...actually try it.

    -David
     
  17. SDS909

    SDS909 Registered Member

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    I PM'd you my actual reciept of purchase.. Also I filed a dispute with Paypal back at that time, which I have all of the records of, and they listed your company as "Non-Compliant" with the dispute, but were unable to refund me because it was a "Downloaded" product. This was in spite of me offering a letter of destruction to Paypal, they simply didn't support a refund of that method, and said you folks weren't compliant with their requests for more information. Credit Card chargeback wasn't an option due to it being from Paypal, otherwise I would have immediately charged it back.

    I am well aware of how business works, I have worked for a couple pretty large security companies myself - including the obvious outsourcing that happens. I don't have a problem getting money back or getting taken for rides by companies though as you mentioned, and honestly, the only time it has happened to me has been with FBM software. Certainly nothing I think about on a regular basis, but when the opportunity comes up to mention it (like it did here), I definitely bring it up and speak rather loudly about it. Its $30, not the end of the world, and at this point, I treat it as a principle issue. When I am promised something, I tend to hold people to those promises. I am sure you understand.

    Anyway, I PM'd you, we'll see where this goes from here I guess.

    Thanks for the reply.
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2006
  18. aigle

    aigle Registered Member

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    BTW my experience with 0spyware has been good( trial). It,s nice but I have some suggestions.

    1- Need more advertisement( compare with Webroot n Spyware doctor- how much they do).

    2- Interface is much clumspy and haphazard to me, it realy needs improvement.

    3- Alerts are rather obtrusive, they should appear from right lower corner and again interface should be neat and clean.

    4- Adding some heiristic features( with some advanced mode) may make it attractive to both ordinary users and geeks.

    5- Some free online scan( may be only detection- not removal, like spyaudit a,d trendmicro etc) will be a very good idea.

    Thanks
     
  19. zerospyware

    zerospyware Registered Member

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    Aigle,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    We pride ourselves on our interface, but there is always room for improvment. Would love to hear more detailed feedback...

    Agree 100% we've been working on it for the next release. Also working on some new technology that I can't discuss yet to drastically reduce the number of alerts without compromising security.

    Heuristics can be particularly difficult when dealing with spyware. Especially when dealing with middle ground spyware or grayware. I'm interested in hearing what sort of heuristics you or others have in mind...

    We actually had a freeonline scanner in the past. Our concern was that we had to use activeX technology (as the others do) to make this work. This ofcourse causes alarming warnings to pop-up when you hit the site. Which causes many users to click away. We are instead contemplating a free edition of Zerospyware with some crippled features similar to the Adaware model. Our current free edition Zerospyware LE was too crippled.. so this new version would be based on the same code base as Zerospyare CE 3.4 , with several of the advanced feaetures removed. Any thoughts on this? What do you like about the free online scans (not a challenge.. im interetested).

    -David
     
  20. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    I find the interface nice . Very nice . Alerts are fine for me as well . This seems very nitpicky as an alert is an alert . As for heuristics , I find this to actually be better on my system at blocking malware than SS OR SD . So are advanced heuristics actually needed ?
     
  21. Heco

    Heco Registered Member

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    Hi,
    Other suggestions if you allow me to...:
    - It would be nice if, when you doubleclick on the systray icon, the main window could pop up right in the middle of the screen and not partially hidden because too much on the right-hand side!:-*
    - It would be very convenient if the ZSloader program could be loaded at EACH reboot and prevent me from manually getting it started sometimes:)
    Thanks for taking these little annoyances into account for a quick repair.
    Cheers;)
     
  22. hollywoodpc

    hollywoodpc Registered Member

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    Heco .
    Mine does popup in the middle with everything showing and it does load at reboot . Maybe I got a lucky copy then:) . Sorry , I do not see what you are seeing .
     
  23. ErikAlbert

    ErikAlbert Registered Member

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    Well, I tried the "Vulnerability Scanner" under the menu tab "Spyware Prevention" of ZeroSpyware yesterday and it worked.
    Each vulnerable object on the list was explained in detail with a reference to the M$ website, where the fix was mentioned for downloading. Very convenient.
    In the very end every vulnerable object was gone after the fix was downloaded and installed.

    I also like the sensitive help of ZeroSpyware, which is the best kind of help.
    It's well-known that most users don't like to read the extensive User/Help Manual, because it takes too much time to read such a boring text and how much do you remember after reading such a long text ?
    That's probably the reason why abbreviations like RTM (Read The Manual) and RTFM (Read The F*cking Manual) exist.
    Sensitive help however is always a small text, that is displayed at the moment you really need it and it doesn't take much time to read those.

    Suggestions for small improvements
    1. The format of date mentioned on screens of ZeroSpyware could be improved.
    In Belgium and many other countries we read a date, like 3/9/2006 as 3 September 2006 and not as 9 March 2006 and this can be very confusing as the example indicates.
    So it would be nice to have a setting for the date format : DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY.

    2. The format of time mentioned on screens of ZeroSpyware could be improved.
    In Belgium and many other countries we don't use AM or PM, we use the 24-hour clock.
    We say "19:00" in stead of "07:00 PM"
    So it would be nice to have a setting for the time format : 12-hour or 24-hour clock.
     
  24. Heco

    Heco Registered Member

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    LOL... Maybe your FREE copy is better than mine paid to the full!:D
    Cheers Hollywoodpc;)
     
  25. Heco

    Heco Registered Member

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    I agree with you my next-door european friend:D
     
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