Spywareblaster did not detect...........

..........the download or presence on my hard drive of 40 executable files, among them Zwinky, GirlSense, Webfetti, Kazula, iWon, SmileyCentral, MyFunCards, CursorMania, CardBoiled. MyFunWeb, and others. They spread like wildfire and could not be deleted.

I downloaded Superantispyware which detected all 40, one with a "deadly" warning, along with 221 others. The program took over an hour to check the hard drive and delete these files.

I thought that you would like to know.

 

SpywareBlaster (SWB) is NOT a scanner/detector... it does NOT detect the "presence" of ANY files on your hard drive.

Rather, what it does is place certain bad websites (URLs) in one's IE [Internet Explorer] restricted zone, which limits what these sites can so. Likewise, it sets "killbits", disabling IE-ActiveX functions for certain bad sites.

(Additionally, it can block some cookies in IE and Firefox.)

If you go to one of SWB's restricted sites using IE, I would think you'd get some type of warning if you tried to download a file from that site; and likewise, if you tried to download or run an ActiveX program in IE that SWB "killed". But if you go to these same sites in other browsers (e.g., Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari), then SpywareBlaster offers you no such protection against an active download. And as I already noted in the first paragraph, once successfully downloaded, SWB does nothing to scan/dectect for such files on your hard drive.

Your first line of defense should be your resident antivirus. For things that "slip though", then, as you found out, SAS is a good anti-MALWARE scanner. Another excellent choice is MBAM (MalwareBytes AntiMalware).

Does this mean SWB is "useless"? NO, it's great for what it was intended to restrict/block!! But one should not assume it does more than advertised... in particular, it is NOT a scanner/detector.