Is Pest Patrol's eTrust PestScan legit?

I recently bought my first computer. In addition to Symantec's NIS, which came with the Dell, I bought Spy Sweeper, and also downloaded both SpywareBlaster and Spybot (and donated to both, I might add).

After getting clean spyware scans from all three, I ran a free PestScan from the Pest Patrol site, which allegedly found 28 items, including SystemSpy keylogger, Fake CD.99 cracking tool, BonziBuddy spyware, and some misc. tracking cookies and adware.

What was odd about these results was that I could only see the last 10 items (couldn't scroll to the rest), the scan only took a minute or so to do, and it didn't seem to be reading the hard drive, i.e. no sound as if it were running. I thought the scan was hung up somehow because nothing seemed to be going on, and booted out of it once before retrying. By contrast, Spy Sweeper takes about 7-8 minutes to scan my computer. Maybe PestScan just scanned the memory.

Is it likely that these are all false positives? What bothers me most of the 10 out of 28 pests I could see onscreen is the keylogger, but they are all of legitimate concern for one reason or another. I don't like people installing software on my computer without my expressed permission, regardless of what it is. It's unethical and irresponsible.

I think Dell was recommending PestPatrol in its online help for malware, so I assume it is a legitimate product, but I am dubious about the scan results. Is it likely the other antispyware products mentioned above collectively missed 28 items? I know no antimalware product of any kind catches everything, but this is a bit much.

By the way, the scan will not remove the items, but manual removal details are provided. Too tricky for me at this juncture. I would hate to think they would list phantom malware to get you to buy their product to remove it, as that's really dishonest, but you never know these days. It's a standard ploy of shady businesses to show you problems that don't exist in order to soak you for unneeded repairs. I'm thinking there is a better explanation of what's going on here. I see no reason to panic, but these results do raise some concerns.

Any opinions or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks to all.

Dana

 

It is, but it's also famous for False Postives.



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