Spysweeper and Online Armor

I currently run Spysweeper and am trialing Online Armor. The way Online Armor hardens my computer settings is it even necessary to have Spysweeper running?. Should I just use Spysweeper for scans and disable the guard?. Any feedback will be much appreciated..

 

Hi there Mongol .
You will be fine by disabling the guards and only use SS as on demand .
Hope that helps and GREAT choice in OA . Excellent program

 

I have to agree. I am real impressed with Online Armor and have it running along side NOD32 on my work laptop. They seem very impenetrable as a tandem. They may just have a new customer. Another plus is that Online Armor is noticably lighter on RAM...cheers...

 

I may keep Spysweeper on board just for scanning since I have about 6 months left on the license. Or maybe just go for Lavasoft Adaware, if nothing else its good for cleaning up MRU's eh?.

 

"I may keep Spysweeper on board just for scanning since I have about 6 months left on the license. Or maybe just go for Lavasoft Adaware, if nothing else its good for cleaning up MRU's eh?."

If one can believe the "unbiased analysis" reports, Spy Sweeper catches 90+% of spyware and AdAware is down around 60%. I feel that SS is a much stronger program for keeping...even though it has an annual support fee.

I agree that with OA, the shields in SS are unnecessary.

 

At the moment i am testing Online Armor meself,
but i am very curious to know if you find still find malware
with Spy Sweeper , if you are running both.

And if you found malware, what kind ?

 

As I understand Online Armor it hardens your system and all active X scripts so that it is virtually impossible for anything to install. The new Version 2 expected out in 2-3 months is also going to provide a high level of registry protection. I have seen Mike Nash of Online Armor posting in here and maybe he will explain further. Since I primarily use Firefox the active X thing is not such a big deal. I will keep Spysweeper around but may disable the active guard and use it as a scanner if I take the leap and buy a license. It is looking likely that I will...

 

Just curious, do you think I should keep Spysweepers guard active and disable the shields?...

 

Keeping/using/uninstalling something is ultimately up to you.

If you have a new program and am trialling it, then *most* certainly I would keep others until you grow in confidence to use it singularly.

OA for example, when I first trialled it, I absolutely did not turn anything else off.

2 reasons: 1] I still wanted to make sure of my protection; 2] I wanted to make sure they were compatible, because if not, then there could be trouble down the road.

But personally as to having OA as a frontline defender now, absolutely, it's the first to warn me on virtually everything, followed by Kerio FW, etc.

I have had spysweeper for quite a while, but I never enabled 'any' of the active shields on it, I had reserved that job for AdWatch from AdAware PRO and SpywareGuard.

I only kept SS as a 'checking scanner' and only in rare instances does it find something else [which is always a very tiny item as in a cookie] apart from AAW or Spybot.

SpywareGuard is no longer running now in my SysTray, just FW/AV/AdWatch and Online Armour.

Cheers, TAS

 

Basically, Online Armor combines execution protection, along with an HTTP, POP3 and IMAP proxy. The proxies filter content coming on to your system before they get to your browser/mail client. For example, OA will warn if a page contains references to ActiveX objects.

The execution protection is a second line of defence. If something gets past OA (which is certainly possible) or you allow in error (also possible) then you would get a warning of an exe trying to run.

Assuming you block it, that's it - nailed forever. If you allow it, you can also delete files created by it. There are other features in there - for example, control over brower helper objects.

So, typically in the event of a drive-by infection you could get :

1. A warning that page contains dangerous object, (ActiveX)
2. A warning that the program is trying to run
3. Autostart warning
4. Notification of an attempt to install a Browser extension

That should be sufficient in the most parts to alert you that something strange is happening (assuming, you press allow each time)

I'd be very curious about that too

 

Thanks Taz!
But ..
Don't worry, the setup of the testpc is so, that i don't mind if it gets infected.

Recovery takes from a infected pc, takes 2 seconds here!

 

1. Thanks Mike Nash for popping in and for the explanation about Online Armor.

2. Thanks Tazzie for the suggestion about keeping all the goodies on hand while trialing Online Armor. I was looking for suggested feedback on what I could or should do if I bought Online Armor. All my other security software is running here for the test drive. So far the drive has been quite smooth...

 

No problem

I don't notice all of the OA threads over here, but when I do I'm happy to step in where I can help.

 

Thanks MikeNash !

 

Just my experience. I trialled OA and bought it recently. It has replaced SpySweeper which I just keep as an on-demand scanner. I have also stopped using SpywareGuard. Until recently I also ran BOClean but even that I now use as an optional guard if I have a concern. I just run OA alongside my Filseclab firewall and Avast! antivirus.

 

hi b00sfuk,

Is that because you have run them together for a while,
and found out that you did not found malware more since
you where using O.A. ?

or is it because you just have a lot of trust O.A.

For the record, this is a honest question, i have no experience
and thus opinion regarding O.A. YET.

 

Both, mainly I had growing confidence in OA, once you use it for a while and understand what it is doing you appreciate its overall benefit. My on-line habits mean I'm not generally exposed to much malware anyway. If I frequented file-sharing sites etc. I might want to go for a more multilayered approach and would also run apps like BOClean etc. at startup. There is no harm in running multiple apps as they don't generally interfere (though multiple prompts might get annoying), I was happy to drop BOClean though as its CPU spikes were annoying.

 

@ Mongol,

I have split off your post and other related posts concerning Process Guard and Online-Armor into a thread of it's own to keep things someone separated from the discussion on Spysweeper and Online-Armor.

This thread--->Process Guard and Online-Armor

 

OOPS...sorry about that, I kinda wandered off topic a bit...

 

It's all good

 

I was one of the original beta testers of OA, and found that it noticeably slowed my system down (eg. starting apps etc). I have installed it several times since but still found it slowed my system down too much for my liking, although I haven't ried one of the more recent builds. That said, I do believe Mike's support is top notch and is up there with the best. I will no doubt try it again in the future to see if it runs any better on my system.

Regarding SpySweeper...... Don't like it and haven't for a long time. It's bloated and has a horrible, though distinct user interface. It's also very badly programmed, being resource hungry and using Madshi's libraries (ie. WebRoot don't write or understand the hooking/injection technology involved in their product, surprising though it may be).

Since you still have 6 months left on SpySweeper licence, I would keep it for on-demand scanning only, and disable the real-time protection.

For real-time spyware, I currently run Ad-Watch alongside my AV/FW/HIPS.

 

Please, try a more recent build

Seriously, if you have low ram and your system pages then OA will not perform as nicely as it could. There were also a couple of issues in there relating to incorrectly checking hashes on some files - these should be fixed.

IF you still have slowdown problems, I'll swap you a nice shiny licence key for help in figuring out why OA slows down on your system.


Cheers


Mike

 

This is the kind of customer support that amazes me. Thats why I bought a license.

 

Cannot get any more fairer than that. Gotta luv it! Very

TAS