I HATE that I might have to admit v.MS & Anti Spyware.

I have always believed in the power of Ad-Aware and Spybot ran on one system to keep it clean and free of Ad/Spyware. They work together great (Although this was not the case when they were both new). Well, here at work I have ran Ad-Aware and Spybot on this XP Home computer over and over again. It started out with a ton of Ad/Spyware. I ran both programs until the computer was "spotless". Today I decided I would give the maker of the worlds buggiest products a try. I installed Microsoft's:

Microsoft Antispyware Beta1.

I left all the default settings as I went through the install. Right when it was installed I was alerted right away that "Messanger Services" was running. It even gave me a small read on what that was. It said it has been known to cause many pop-ups. It then gave me two options. I clicked "Stop" It already had a check box checked for me so that it would remember my decision. So far, so good. Microsoft? Good? Strange.

Next came the scan.

Ad-aware as I have said, came up clear!
Spybot, the same.

Now I ran Microsoft's Spy/Adware prog.

32 infected files!

To some of you 32 may not seem like a lot, but something that really caught my eye is the fact that almost every single thing found were things Spybot and Ad-Aware had supposedly REMOVED!

I hate, HATE, HATE, and HATE Microsoft and most of thier products, but maybe this is worth a look...?

Try it out. You be the judge.

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LINK: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...en&Hash=M5X9DQ4
Note: I did the deep scan.
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almost every single thing found were things Spybot and Ad-Aware had supposedly REMOVED!

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When one product finds something and another doesn't I wonder about false positives. Obviously all 3 thought it was infected but only 1 cleaned it.

Just curious ... Did you reboot in between? Did you rescan with Spybot and Ad-Aware to see if MS really cleaned it?

Spybot, by default will ignore 4 known types of spyware. To make Spybot detect them, you must configure it to run in Advanced mode, then go into Settings and Ignore Products. In the Ignore Products list you will find 4 products that are checked to be ignored.
I had the same results when I had scanned my systems with all 3 anti spyware products...MS still found a few.
If you move your mouse arrow over the MS AntiSpyware icon (on your desktop) you will see that it identifies itself as "Giant AntiSpyware Main Application". So if you're not a fan of MS...its still okay to like the MS (Giant) AntiSpyware tool. :)

Interesting for sure!

I have used Spybot S & D and Adaware since their arrival on scene. But I don't use them as the sole source of cleanup so I couldn't tell you if that would happen on my machine. I begin my cleaning with Xen by Paul Brown, then followed by Clean Disk Security, then jump into safe mode and use my AV, Spybot, Adaware, and Swatit. After that I reboot and visit Trend Micro. Some would say that's overkill, but actually I usually break out the Martin while all of this is going on. :)

So for curiousity sake, I'll down load MS's little ditty, use it when I would use the other two, and the next time after the other two, to see what it says.

cheers

As from reading around Giant was bought out by MS, or atleast Giant's Spyware prog was. MS just put thier name on it. I guess that is one reason it seems to be so good. Once the beta version/s is/are gone, MS will be asking for $.

Erm, When you "removed" the add and spyware with the first 2 programs did you perhaps quarantine rather than remove and hence the ms scanner was picking them up but they were perhaps not active ?

I swear I must have the cleanest machine in existence - even after waiting 2 weeks between scans.

Spybot - found nothing
Adaware - same
M$beta - same

I'm debating going out and purposely trying to infect myself just so I can compare the three.

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Originally posted here by mark_boyle2002
Erm, When you "removed" the add and spyware with the first 2 programs did you perhaps quarantine rather than remove and hence the ms scanner was picking them up but they were perhaps not active ?

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Haha In every forum I have talked about this, they have all asked/said the same thing. I do no use the quarantine options on any prog. I think it's a dumb option.

messenger is not a adware/spyware. Its a standard windows 2000/xp service that you can disable if you want. It allows you to sent messages over netbios using command prompt like:
net send 192.168.1.2 Hi
then 192.168.1.2 would get a window that says Hi. Sysadmins use it if they want to send announcements on internal networks.

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Haha In every forum I have talked about this, they have all asked/said the same thing.

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I must admit that was my first thought as well.... ;)

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I do no use the quarantine options on any prog. I think it's a dumb option.

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However, this post has to do with your above statement regarding quarantining being a 'dumb' option. I must disagree.... I was cleaning a friend's PC a while back, and let AdAware find and quarantine everything it could - turns out my friend's PC had an instance of a particularly nasty little spyware app (don't remember the name right now, search forums, I talked of it somewhere on here) that once quarantined, caused ALL of the networking functionality to go sour. The PC basically thought it wasn't connected anymore. After about an hour of fiddling, I finally went back and restored the items from the AdAware quarantine - problem fixed. I ended up removing that spyware by another method. I was almost to the point of reformatting when I restored from the quarantine - saved myself a lot of time because of the quarantine.

Moral of the story, the quarantine is a useful piece....

No need to infect yourself BlackIce...

Check out this report http://spywarewarrior.com/asw-test-guide.htm

Seems they did that work for you...

Their tables seem to show some of the things each program misses.

No three programs seem to catch everything.

There is a somewhat related article at the top of our main page in the security news section.

http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/se...le.php/3482351

Sophos are predicting that the MS anti-spyware will be increasingly targetted by malware as it moves out of beta.

I must agree with Maverick's comments on the quarantine.

1. I have seen too many false positives not to
2. Sometimes I want to take a look at what I have "caught"

I just empty them manually when I have finished. :)

make way coming thru

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Microsoft is investigating reports of a Trojan which attempts to disable its AntiSpyware beta product.

The Troj/BankAsh-A Trojan, discovered yesterday, is designed to st...

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http://www.vnunet.com/news/1161161

I knew it seemed to good to be true... That's what microsoft gets for having evil plans to charge for the update definitions haha...

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I knew it seemed to good to be true... That's what microsoft gets for having evil plans to charge for the update definitions haha...

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^u said it bro u said it^^^^^^^^