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What is Spycar?
Spycar is a suite of tools designed to mimic spyware-like behavior, but in a benign form. Intelguardians created Spycar so anyone could test the behavior-based defenses of an anti-spyware tool. Spycar runs only on Windows, the same platform most targeted by spyware developers.
Why did you create Spycar?
Many anti-spyware tools put all of their eggs in the signature basket. That is, the vendor detects spyware by including thousands of signatures looking for specific sequences of bits on your hard drive or in memory. Behavior-based detection, another approach, lets anti-spyware stop malicious software based on its actions, not a specific set of signatures. We wanted to see how anti-spyware tools could cope with new spyware for which they didn’t have a signature. In our own laboratory, we tested a bunch of enterprise anti-spyware tools, and found that their behavior-based defenses were seriously lacking. As long as no signature has been defined for a given piece of spyware, a lot of anti-spyware tools offer virtually no protection. We wanted to give you a chance to evaluate your own anti-spyware tool, so we released Spycar.
