Pls help! Which spyware is best??

Hi all,

please advise which spyware is best? In your opinion and why?
Looking for one for my company use.
Thanks lots!!

 

Hi bizfanatic

I assume u meant to say best anti spyware?

Anyway, i moved your thread to Privacy Software as u are asking for opinions on different privacy apps. not just Javacool products.


snowbound

 

At this moment I do not think there is a "best" anti spyware product. The two most highly regarded products are probably ad-aware and spybot. I am not sure about the licensing terms of Spybot in a company but it does not offer automatic updates or central management. This might be a concern if you have a lot of computers in your company. The licensing in Ad-Aware free does not allow for its use in a company so you might have to look into volume licensing with Plus or Pro. I do not believe they offer automatic updates or central management either, though I am not sure (I only use the free version). Spywareblaster is a great product for preventing adware, and does offer automatic updates if one makes a donation. You may want to ask javacool how volume licensing will work. Giant antispyware has been gaining more popularity and it does offer some positives in that it allows for automatic updates and has volume license pricing. However false positives is quite a large concern. You can even consider Kaspersky with extended database. Would be a great solution if your company has not invested in an antivirus solution yet. And they do offer volume licensing and central management.

As far as detection rates go you might want to take a look at Eric Howe's recent tests. But be sure to read the disclaimer. I personally had to work on a computer with a pretty bad adware infection the other day. Spybot successfully cleaned Gain.Gator, Gain.dashbar, and CoolWWWSearch.smallm. But it did not have detection for a Lop variant which was also on the computer. I was able to kill the Lop process and clean it up with Ad-Aware which did have a detection for Lop. There was also an IE hijacker on the computer which created an annoying toolbar at the bottom of IE and a toolbar when one accessed google. Was not detected by Spybot or Ad-Aware. I used hijack this to get rid of it and deleted the folder where it was hiding. I believe it was called copytitle.exe or something. So as you can see a combination of tools is probably best when it comes to cleaning and prevention.

 

Try Giant AntiSpyware.
It has some features you mike like for your company.

 

I also agree that there is no single 'best' anti-spyware that covers it all.

I use the combination of the following tools and it has kept my system very clean of spyware:

- lavasoft AdAware
- Spybot Search & Destroy (both Immunize and Clean)
- JavaCool SpywareBlaster
- HPGuru's hosts file
- Yahoo Antispy (free with Yahoo toolbar, which can be disabled separately and Antispy still works)
- IE-Spyad (from Eric Howes)
- Locking down ActiveX, many active script options and Java options in Internet zone for IE
- using Firefox as my default browser with "don't allow web sites to install software"
- lots of common sense when downloading and installing new/unknown software
- and naturally a good software firewall, anti-virus and anti-trojan utility also

So, I'd recommend checking out the above utilities. Giant Antispyware looks interesting as well, but it does produce quite a few false positives (ie. says something is spyware when it is not).

regards,
halcyon