Microsoft’s Free Spyware Software

on Friday, January 7, 2005 7:14pm

in Software

Microsoft released its free spyware software yesterday in beta called AntiSpyware. I just installed it and ran the quick scan option which only took a few minutes to scan my computer. AntiSpyware quickly found one spyware app lurking on my pc and offered me a variety of options on how to handle the invader.

Unfortunately, I can’t compare how effective AntiSpyware is to Spybot Search & Destroy or Ad-Aware as this is a new machine that has never been inspected for spyware before. Microsoft AntiSpyware does offer a good array of features in a free download that will obviously get distributed to the masses. I don’t even need to say it, but this is a good thing.

Features of AntiSpyware include: spyware scanning (quick scan and full searching), real-time protection, auto updating, scan scheduling, privacy tools to erase your browsing tracks, and a browser hijack restore.

I still need to revisit other tools and compare this to the leaders in the spyware removal space, but for a beta version Microsoft has delivered a solid effort.

Additional Resources:

Nathan Weinberg post on InsideMicrosoft

Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

Slashdot

Information Week

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