Current status of Spybot

Most pc techs like myself, at one time or another relied on spybot at one point for our malware removal needs.I had seen people ask if spybot was still a useful tool since we have all these other anti-malware softwares coming up behind it.I did a little experiment, and threw a bunch of malware and rogues onto a PC and ran spybot first.Spybot found several things and was unable to clean at least one component of a rogue antivirus.



Then I ran Malwarebytes to see what was left, it found alot more as you can see from the screen shot and removed all it found.I had to do a little cleanup by myself, but you get the gist.

 

Interesting, unfortunately, if you can remember back to the old days of the net integration forums, SpyBot was the "awesome". I think nearly every product has it's inevitable lifeline, even free.

 

Sad but true. Spybot (and Ad-Aware for that matter) can no longer do the job.
If you have a seriously compromised PC, they cannot clean it up. I haven't used them in almost 2 years...

 

Did you try the reverse? 1st MBAM, then Spybot.

 

Have to agree re. Spybot, and Lavasoft's Ad-aware which I uninstalled a few
years ago when it became so bloated.

Ran Spybot for the final time about 3 weeks ago and could see it's CPU usage
was up over 50% while scanning - I shall continue updating for the Immunization factor on IE, and the Resident factor, which I don't understand
what exactly it does.

 

No, did not want to make a big production of it, just used to like spybot and had to see for myself and figured I'd share the results.If i'd done it the other way around, you can see by the screen shots how it would have turned out anyway.

I just ran a Dr. web cure it free version and it found nothing left over from malwarebytes, so kudos to malwarebytes.

though there were some things left behind after malwarebytes like I said, that I manually took off, not sure whos fault that is, mabe i checked before the reboot so it could clean up and I just beat it to it.

I can't really see using it " spybot " anymore.

 

I still use Spybot but only for Immunization and occasional File Shredding. I am thinking about dumping Spybot. Ad-Aware I dumped several years ago.

 

ccomputertek, i understand the 'big production' part. I'm not criticising you, just making an observation. It's just that i think you needed/wanted to test it the other way around.

That it leaves stuff behind, all signature based programs do. What would "prove" or "disprove" its usefulness would be seeing if it detected something MBAM doesn't.

MBAM leads every time i try it or advise it to anyone. Just to leave that out of the way. But perhaps because of that, maybe this post by Malwarebytes Lead Researcher will make you put things into perspective.

 

Pedro, about that link of yours:

I use the Avira security suite.
Non-default settings. It checks for viruses, fraudulent software etc, except for 'games'.

I don't think it leaves much of a grey area. Except possibly for rogue security software, I'm not sure.

 

Spybot is still actively developed last I checked.
I agree that Spybot and Adaware have been surpassed. MBAM is one of the programs that I favor as a scanner.

Spybot does have a good immunization feature though.

 

I also have been thinking about dumping Spybot. I stopped using Adaware 3 years ago and now use Malwarebytes and A squared as back up scanners. I even stopped using SAS because of recent problems with that.
But going back to Spybot, I only use it for it's immunisation feature, and I use Opera browser which Spybot states it immunises against 'content' and cookies, can anyone tell me what is the 'content' it immunises against ?

Thanks Gordon

 

Well I heard they are coming out with spybot S&D 2.0, I bet that might be able to keep up with all the new ones like malwarebytes, we shall see.

 

Spybot and Ad-Aware were one of rare tools to combad first adware and spyware infections.

At that time antivirus programs did not detect a lot of these.

Ad-Aware seems to be staying at one place and changing GUI every year. I tested few times and not even single time it could clean infected machine.

Same for Spybot, sometimes I send samples to them because they are people I will support whenever I have enought time. They provided this tool for free and they deserve our support.