How to protect your PC from spyware
A week or two ago I wrote a short rant complaining about the quality of AVG’s free anti-virus software. Although not strictly the same thing, spyware is quite a big problem on a lot of home PCs.
I’ve been using Microsoft’s Windows Defender for quite a while now and I have to say that it has been pretty good. Free to download to those who are willing to partake in Microsoft’s Genuine Windows check, Windows Defender is quite a neat little program.
Downloading and installing Windows Defender is extremely quick and easy; click on the install link, download and run and within a few minutes the install will be complete. Upon completion the application will update its definition files and run an initial quick scan of your PC to check for any problems.
Like most applications Windows Defender has two modes; auto-protect, which will continuously monitor for malicious applications, and on-demand scanning, which will do a full scan across your PC.
One other tool it has which I found quite useful is the Software Explorer page. This allows you to manage what runs when your PC starts up, what is currently running on your PC and which applications are accessing your network. It also provides a bit more information than the standard Task Manager.
Unfortunately Windows Defender only provides real-time download protection explicitly for Internet Explorer. Although it provides protection for any application execution and registration it may not be able to detect threats in any browser except Internet Explorer. I’m not sure this is a huge deal although it does potentially leave you vulnerable to any plug-in-based threats for Firefox, Opera or any other browser.
Alternatives? The only other free anti-spyware product around (that I’m aware of) is Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware. Ad-Aware SE Personal is their free version which will scan your PC for threats; however the free version doesn’t come with real-time scanning or protection unfortunately.
So overall? I reckon that Windows Defender is a pretty good application. Quick and easy to install and pretty effective at what it does. Having said that, Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware SE seems just effective; just let down by the lack of real-time scanning.
Having got my first bit of spyware in about 2 years I have recomend the old war horse Spybot. It did the job removing the nasty bit of spyware. I mean however good the half naked ladies are on the spyware asking you pay £4 a go they do get annoying.
Spybot’s Scan And Defend has always been a decent “after the event” application – it’s very good at identifying problems once they’ve already occurred. I agree that it’s a top program – but as a rule I don’t want the malware to get anywhere near my system! I want it to be blocked at the source, not to be repaired and fixed once I’ve been infected to the hills. It’s like why you wear a condom – yes, syphilis can be cured but let’s be fair, you don’t want it in the first place!
Now I’m a realist – I know that total protection is a pipe dream. But I still believe that real-time protection is essential; and that the biggest barrier to this is the bottleneck caused by disk I/O in 99.9% of computers…