Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA..........

I ran this earlier in another forum without much success.  I couldn't seem to get people to read the thread before they posted. I am also sure that no further details are needed. Here goes:

I tried ad-ware and w/ my current software installations it wasn't happy and kept freezing.  My question to members is:  What experience have you had with Pest Patrol, positive and or negative...........os= w98se, nav01, za, vz.  I bought it on 11/30/01 and updated it as of 1/17/02.  Have not had any type of problems with this product, however, I was curious as to whether it has been reliable in catching the infidels........comments, advise.......tia

PestPatrol is quite a special program. In essence build for network administrators, it is actually very usefull for personal use as well. Contrary to other software reviewed on this page, it does not only detect and defeats trojans RAT's/Backdoors: it does the same with so called other "pests": f.e. worms, spyware, ANSI bombs, DoS tools, virus droppers, hostile Java, ICQ, password crackers remote monitoring, sniffers, spoofers and more. The software detects: the user decides wether or not to quarantine or delete. It gets a 4.5 from wilders.org

I might add that this report was excellent.........

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

I have been using Pest Patrol from some time.  I like it very much.  It has caught some things that other security programs I run didn't.

The company seems comitted to making PP the best security program available.  Also, if you go to the pestpatrol website you'll find there is now a forum.  You may find some of the postings helpful.

Although I have great confidence in PP, I don't rely just on it.  I also have an antivirus, firewall, AdAware, and an anti trojan program.

Although PP is a great all-purpose program, and I wouldn't be without it, I have found that no program yet does it all as well as several programs do.

Regards, Kendp

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

The only problems I have had with PP is a false positive for htastop.exe (two if you count an alert on a doubleclick opt out cookie as false).  Also a previous release of PP would cause a Blue Screen of Death on my system.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

I'm happy with how this application is developing !
You certainly would not have wanted to see my reviews of it a year ago.  At the rate it's going it could become IMHO a very nice addition shortly !

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Re: The false alert on HTAstop:

http://www.suggestafix.com/forum/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?s=3c6bacbc321dffff;act=ST;f=15;t=2264 .

(Kind of doubt that the people at privsoft. com would appreciate the comment made by David Stang in his tech support reply). Pete

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

As one of their beta testers made them rebuild part of it and insert lot of very nice user friendly options. Think it's really growing a good way, while i like options of what it is scanning like just for infections or also for specific info in TXT files, to name an example, so you can know what users (or kids at home) are up to.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Jooske - You mean PestPatrol can be used to spy on other users' of the computer? Pete

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Hi Spy,
For instance an administrator on a network can look what other users have on their drives, as can parents or other users on a home computer. PP can scan for you files with any kind of extention, so even inside TXT files, for instance. PP is not just a trojan or virus scanner, it is there for any kind of pest, as well as information about hacking/infecting etc. So if a user has information on their disc about a virus for instance, either in TXT, DOC, HTML, whatever, the PP can find such files for you and you can look inside as an administrator, what the user might be up to.
In fact PP should have an extra option for detecting adult content to be even more complete in the "pests" sector.

If you really want to see the people in action on their pc, you'll need something like pc-anywhere,  or worse a keylogger.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Jooske - Thank you for the info on PP - I had no idea it could be used like that (since I don't use the program myself).

Keyloggers (or anything like keyloggers) are total anathema to me. Pete

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

You can see some description in the start of this thread by Phoenix.
Possible keyloggers it will detect as well. Only, if people ask about the reliability of the finds, i put questionmarks as well, it will find more then expected, for instance: i had a doc about herbs, and it alarmed on some herbs names which are the same as some nasty infections. And it is the meanting of this program to alarm on netbuster and such age old harmless protective tools, but it can make you puzzling at times. AV/AT most of time have those filtered out, but the use for an administrator or parent is a different story of course.

Several AV/AT programs do only scan the local machine, although there are more scanning the whole network or all logical drives, but not many look into TXT documents and the like.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

I've used PestPatrol for some time.  It has picked up a couple of pests.  I use it with Ad-Aware, ZAP, Nac, SurfinGuard Pro, Internet Organizer Pro and Script Sentry.  There have been no conflicts between these programs- they all seem to get on well together.  There in not a lot gets into my system with my say so.  Most unwanted things should be picked up by PP or one of the other utilities.  I also use The Proxomitron.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Based on what I've seen/read of PP both in this thread and the one on SAF (as well as many other reports seen in various places concerning false alarms by the PP program) - I see no need, now or in the future, to ever have PP on this computer.

Aside from the ability to be used as spyware itself ( see Jooskes' posts, above ), any company whose spokespersons' dodge responsibility for putting out bad defs/false alarms by bad-mouthing someone elses' company (in this case, privsoft) aren't worth the time they take to d/l, IMO. Pete

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

I bought Pest Patrol around the same time you did.  It has never found anything on my machine (Which I consider a good thing) and neither has TDS-3.  The only complaint I have is that the Auto-Updater has gotten broken twice on me.   About every two months after a lot of updates it hoses itself.   He has been making a ton of changes, I expect better stability soon.

Other than that I like it,  The scanning engine is very fast.

 

Re: Pest Patrol - spyware ck/associated w/ZA......

Pete,
to prevent misunderstandings:
the keylogging and pc-anhywhere are not build in PP, but i mean to say if you want that, you can always get such tools anywhere on internet.
For administrators it might be important in some circumstances to have those abilities. For keyloggers i doubt, most certainly with the discussions about Magic Lantern.

You can change each time which kinds of files you want to scan. Depending on the privacy setting in the network you can look into detected files from the server either only from the machine where located.

These days i'm a lot in the computer classroom of a basic school, where internet is installed. You can imagine for what kind of nasties an administrator want to be able to protect the children, to name an example, as any parent would. PP is about all infection/hacking related detection, spyware, etc, although it did find some xxx-related cookies (how often there is not such a banner somewhere on a normal web site we don't even see?) which i immediately could get rid of after discovery, it detected encryption tools which are legally there, etc.
For PP one must leave the idea of a normal AT/AV scanner, it is more for all kinds of pest other programs don't even notice at all, besides a normal scanner.
With that the more or less false alarms in text docs can be part of the "game" and such discoveries need further inspection by looking at them. In the log you can see full explanation about the finds.