Hello, I have been asking about some apps or programs, i installed before, but I don't know if nowadays are still useful or are a good idea to give them a try again This time is SUPERAntiSpyware turn... So is SUPERAntiSpyware still a good security software? Please share your thoughts Thanks Camelia
I still have a lifetime license for SAS, but I haven't used this software for ages. I think there are better options these days. Just my two cents.
If you already have it, and not experiencing problems, I say keep using it. But I would find it hard to justify spending any money on the pro version if I didn't already own a lifetime license myself.
I used SAS from the beginning. In the early years it was really good at what it did. But it stopped doing it and was bypassed by many others. Probably most notably MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. The rest is history. In the past few years I have ran it a couple times for old-times sake. Nothing more. I can say almost exactly the same for SpyBot. As noted above, its name should be changed to SuperCookieFinder.
It is much more today than a spyware or cookie finder. It just does not standout above the crowd like it once did. If you check its website, it checks for "Spyware, Adware and Remove Malware, Trojans, Dialers, Worms, KeyLoggers, HiJackers, Parasites, Rootkits, Rogue Security Products and many other types of threats."
Ten years ago it found and removed a trojan on my Belnea O book that SpyBot and Norton missed. It was Google's malware filter that warned me originally malware had passed onto my computer. I think it's slipped a bit since Nick Skrepetos sold it to Support.com. Oddly, they admit this. "Spyware, Adware and Remove Malware, Trojans, Dialers, Worms, KeyLoggers, HiJackers, Parasites, Rootkits, Rogue Security Products and many other types of threats."
I've said it before elsewhere in this forum but the only thing besides the odd tracking cookie SAS ever detected on my machines was itself!
When it was first released, SAS was one of the best, if not the best antispyware programs. But as has been mentioned, these days its detection rates are abysmal for anything other than tracking cookies. As well as that, they still use the same highly misleading marketing that they have used all along, offering a limited time discount that has actually never ended.
Back in my stoopid days I bought 5 Professional licenses. This graphic shows how low I have bought it for. Even at that price I think I paid too much.
Yeah, I still like to watch SAS clean them though lol. It doesn't matter what I do or try to mitigate against tracking cookies, the occasional one slips through.
I bought also a lifetime license for SAS, But I lost it... Sooooooooooooo since "it's not "a good security software" when compared to many others out here" then I don't care CCleaner does the same job to remove tracking cookies as SAS or PrivaZer? Thanks Camelia
First off, I'd like to thank them for honoring the Lifetime license. I have one. I also had one for WinZip which they backed out of around v10 if y'all remember. SAS was the best of the best at one time. I cleaned up a lot of machines with it. Stuff the rest would miss. And there was the portable edition you could also use. Have to pay for that now. I run MBAM on another device, and honestly, I can't say one is better than the other. Using Ublock, noscript etc in the browser takes some pressure off these programs IMHO. And even most browsers now flag a lot of those deceptive sites. Being a little tech savvy while surfing or checking email helps too A lot of the AV programs now catch the things this type of software is designed for. That wasn't always the case some years back. Reality is, you won't know how good they actually are until you catch something and then see how well it eradicates it. I'd probably renew it if I had to. It runs well along side Defender.
SAS has had absolutely abysmal detection rates for a long time now, whereas Malwarebytes continues to have excellent detection rates. As a second opinion scanner to use alongside antivirus software, there's not much point using SAS, as there's not much chance it will detect anything that Malwarebytes doesn't. Tracking cookies are an exception to this, as Malwarebytes does not scan for them.
I run Panda Dome on Win 7 and mostly all other defences are browser hardening. However, I still run SAS and SpywareBlaster. SAS may not be what it was but, apart from removing tracking cookies, I do like it as a second scanner. I ran MBAM (free version) for a few years and although I can't deny its high detection rates, in my experience, it gave consistently high amounts of false positives. I ceased reporting these on the MBAM forums after getting abuse from the fanboys there. So eventually I just uninstalled it. I think this is the great dilemma with anti-malware programs as a whole. If they're sufficiently good to remove threats they tend to be too aggressive to use in reality. And if they aren't regularly accidentally eviscerating your hard drive they appear to be ineffectual. There's a good reason I'm typing this on a laptop running Linux lol.
I've used Malwarebytes since it was first released and had have pretty much never had issues with false positives. However, due to its aggressive detection of PUPs, particularly recently, I've have had to add hundreds of files and registry keys to its ignore list. Thankfully, this is very easy to do from the scan results screen.
I'm guessing I've just been unlucky. I've known it brick a relative's machine more than once due to false positives. The first time I installed MBAM was about 2008 and almost straight away it tried to remove six totally legitimate drivers from my laptop at the time. Not long after I was on a website using SeaMonkey's inbuilt Google translator (the site was Russian). Google's own filters informed me that malware had been detected passing onto my machine. It was partially my own fault anyway, I had no adblocker and I had tried to close a pop-up in Cyrillic that seemed to come from nowhere. I ran a full AV scan (Norton), SpyBot S&D and then MBAM. Only SAS, the last one I tried, found the trojan. All of the others didn't find anything.
I got caught by them too only it was way way back around V2, not V10 - back when Nico Mac (original developer) used to send postcards in the mail (yes, snail mail) to announce new updates. And they lost me as a customer for it. I have had a couple other companies do that to me. It is "Lifetime" as long as they continue that version. So if you buy V2.0, you can upgrade for free to V2.1, 2.51 up to 2.9999 but as soon as they go to V3.0, you have to pay up again. I am sure it is in the fine print somewhere, but I still think it is a marketing scam. Inanimate objects and software are NOT alive. Therefore, IMO, "lifetime" refers to my life, not the product's. Oh well.
