CyberNirvana

Steve Hargreaves over at Tech Support Alert did some thorough research recently the most effective and free Adware/Spyware/Scumware Remover programs. Quote from Steve:

I went hunting around the seedier side of Hong Kong websites, picking up as many infections as I could find in a 30 minute surfing session, and then seeing how today’s anti-malware software coped, and without a doubt SuperAntiSpyware was the best.

During my surfing session I managed to acquire nearly 200 nasties, and SuperAntiSpyware found 176 of them. Compared with the second best performer, this was an amazingly high figure, but not quite perfect. However, there are more plusses here. Installation was quick and painless, with scanning time at the default settings impressively quick, and the cleanup process effective. However, it was when I cleaned up that the only fly in the ointment appeared. Whilst SAS did clean every infection it found, on the first attempt it left some behind. A second scan and clean cured this.

The final cleanup was done with a full scan, rather than the quick/smart scan used for testing the software reviewed here, though this took three times as long to detect a single additional threat. Nevertheless, nothing else even came close to the detection rate of SAS.

The runner up in my test was MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, which detected 104 threats, though the time taken to detect them was a little longer than SAS. Having said that, scanning again after I let SAS clean up my system, Malwarebyte’s offering still found an additional 28 threats that SAS had failed to detect. Most of these were Trojans, which suggests the two are aimed at slightly different threats. Anti-malware happily removed these with no troubles at all.

You can read more about his investigation on Gizmo's Tech Support Alert site.

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