RE: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling further behind

For my personal use, I use a combination of MSAS, Spybot, and Ad-aware.
I find myself doing a lot of house calls lately to clean up
friends/family's computers that have been consumed by the devil of
spyware. I have seen the worst of the worst and with some patience; I
have gotten many of the computer I work on to a stable working order
with the 3 mentioned applications above without having to sing the song
of "fdisk, format, reinstall, Do Da, Do Da".

For the enterprise solution, I have tried Webroot's Enterprise
Spysweeper. The install went 'ok' but I couldn't even get the resource
hogging java based application to allow me to log in. And the support
was horrible. I eventually gave up and uninstalled it from my server.

I think we all dream of a day when computers will heal themselves, but
then we would be out of jobs.

-Brad Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe George [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 8:08 AM
To: Planz; Quark IT - Hilton Travis
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling further behind

I would also recommend running MSAS and/or any other anti-spyware
utility on normal mode and once in safe mode for good measure.  I was
amazed at what wasn't being picked up in some cases after running once.
I definitely agree with Bruce Klein.  Using more anti-spyware apps maybe
overkill, but if it doesn't affect the host machine negatively, might as
well. Rebuilding computers should be a last resort.

Best,

Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Planz [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 9:36 PM
To: Quark IT - Hilton Travis
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Microsoft AntiSpyware falling further behind

My experience with MSAS was also similar. To verify whether MSAS is 
really working, I used SpybotS&D to scan my PC after surfing for 
sometime. MSAS, didn't alert me during the surfing, but SpybotS&D 
detected a lot.  No single security solution is a saviour.

Quark IT - Hilton Travis wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>It seems that not only does Microsoft AntiSpyware recommend that
>Claria's spyware is ignored, but it also misses a significant amount of
>cookies that are placed on a system - I have a VPC environment where I
>browse the Internet so that anywhere I go won't affect my regular
>Windows session/installation.  Regularly CounterSpy is detecting
cookies
>(such as Cok.ad.yieldmanager, CGI-Bin, Cok.AssassinTrojan2.0 and Zedo
>(from yesterday's browsing)) that Microsoft AntiSpyware simply does not
>know about.
>
>Now, this is not only disappointing, but potentially dangerous.  Any
>customer or end user running Microsoft AntiSpyware or CounterSpy is not
>being protected from these cookies, and MSAS doesn't even detect them -
>that's right, neither program's active monitoring is stopping the
>installation of these cookies, but at least CounterSpy is detecting
them
>post-installation.
>
>AntiSpyware is far, far from the accuracy of antivirus, especially
>something like NOD32.  I wonder how long it will be before a decent
>AntiSpyware application is released that, like NOD32 does with viruses,
>actually stops spyware *before* it is installed?
>
>--
>
>Regards,
>
>Hilton Travis                          Phone: +61 (0)7 3344 3889
>(Brisbane, Australia)                  Phone: +61 (0)419 792 394
>Manager, Quark IT                      http://www.quarkit.com.au
>         Quark Group                   http://quarkgroup.com.au/
>
>Microsoft Small Business Specialists
>
>http://www.threatcode.com/ <-- its now time to shame poor coders 
>into writing code that is acceptable for use on today's networks
>
>War doesn't determine who is right.  War determines who is left.
>
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