Valdis Shkesters wrote:
At first you can take look here http://secunia.com/product/4256/.
This summer German magazine ComputerBild compared several
popular antispyware products. Test results are available in the forum
http://www.rokop-security.de/lofiversion/index.php/t8810.html.
Scrolling through detailed figures by categories of harmful programs
can be seen. I warn that the figures may be very unpleasant for fans
of some products.
...which may simply reflect that they are shite tests, rather than
anything especially meaningful about the products??
As a rule, "anti-spyware" products fall into one of two camps:
1. "Never mind the quality, feel the width" -- you can usually pick
these because their advertising lays heavy stress on the 43 quadrillion
spyware items they claim to detect. These products will remove 17
bazillion entirely harmless items from "normal" systems simply because
they happended to be string-matches on filename ("of course you don't
want ANY 'unwise.exe' files on your system!"), reg key/value/etc, and
so on.
2. Cluefull. These will not have the stupid false-positive rates of
the above, but as a result will not apparently score as well on
clueless tests of the kind the proponents of the first kind of anti-
spyware product push.
I'd like to say -- stealing something from a colleague -- "welcome to
antivirus 101" but actually, I think things in the anti-spyware testing
arena are a lot worse than all but the very, very, very worst ever AV
tests AND it seems anti-spyware tests will continue to get worse,
rather than better...
--
Nick FitzGerald
Computer Virus Consulting Ltd.
Ph/FAX: +64 3 3267092
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