Microsoft’s AntiSpyware Beta Testdrive

I installed Microsoft’s free AntiSpyware Beta on a couple of machines to test it out and it works well and is fast, although it’s certainly beta quality. Unfortunately on one machine it exhibited a fatal flaw.

Machine one was my old business machine that my wife has adopted. It runs Windows 2000 and McAfee antivirus. Not surprisingly, Microsoft AntiSpyware found and deleted a few spyware programs.

It had one major flaw. For whatever reason, McAfee would periodically die. Since I don’t like the idea of my wife, or actually anyone, running without antivirus software, I removed it from the machine and McAfee has been happy ever since.

Machine two is my main laptop running Windows XP Professional and Norton antivirus. There were no major problems, and not surprisingly no spyware was found. It did however regularly ask me about “A Change to the Default User Folder Requires Approval,” and the “Remember this action” checkbox didn’t work. Just an annoyance, but enough so that I eventually removed Microsoft AntiSpyware!

Supposedly other antispyware programs are more thorough and find more spyware. I’m not surprised, this is “beta.” Some will complain that it doesn’t deal with cookies on their machines. Spyware programs differ on whether cookies constitute spyware and the entire issue is controversial. Cookies exist for a reason, and even Internet Explorer lets you turn them all off if you’d like! Some will complain that it comes from Microsoft and therefore is horrible. I avoid religious issues and won’t comment on this further!

As a fascinating aside, Sophos PLC has just discovered MalWare called BankAsh-A that specifically targets Microsoft's AntiSpyware. It attempts to delete it and also tries to steal users' banking passwords.