Tom Markiewicz

Thoughts on technology, marketing and entrepreneurship.

Microsoft’s Free Spyware Software

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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

Popularity: 5% [?]

Written by Tom Markiewicz

January 7th, 2005 at 7:14 pm

Posted in Software

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