Spy Sweeper Review

Product: Spy Sweeper Price: $29.95 per year Company Info: Webroot Software Editor Rating: 3 1/2 stars Download Spy Sweeper

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Pros

+ Good protection against spyware
+ Bi-weekly updates to the latest spyware definition files.

Cons

- Some usability annoyances, such as fixed-width windows and intrusive popup alerts when new favorites are added.

Spy Sweeper Review

Webroot’s Spy Sweeper is a very effective standalone tool for detecting, removing, and blocking spyware of all the products we tested.

As of December 2004, it contains over 30,000 spyware signatures (although many of these are tracking cookies). In our spyware effectiveness test, Webroot detected 85% of spyware and disabled 69% of it. While this was a good result, Spy Sweeper's effectiveness seems to have slipped behind other vendors in the past few months.

Spy Sweeper can can detect spyware running in memory, stop browser hijackings, examine your startup settings, remove tracking cookies, and eliminate registry changes made by intruding programs. It does a good job eliminating tough-to-remove spyware that often evades detection or removal with lesser products by removing it during the next boot cycle. It can even detect when new spyware tries to install itself while you are surfing.

After removing offending spyware, Spy Sweeper will immunize your computer against certain kinds of “repeat offenders” such as browser hijackings and tracking cookies. We discovered no problems on either Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Usability

Spy Sweeper has the kind of slick interface one expects with modern utilities. You interact with the program primarily through a toolbar on the left that offers you a few simple choices … but in practice, only one, “Sweep Now”, is necessary.

After choosing this option and pressing “start”, Spy Sweeper will perform an in-depth scan of your system. A few minutes later you’ll be shown all spyware that was detected on your system. Webroot isn’t the fastest anti-spyware of the bunch, but this isn’t because of poor performance. Rather, it’s because it scans every file on your hard drive instead of taking hueristic short-cuts that can lead to missed spyware.

Removal

When the scan is complete, Spy Sweeper will give you a detailed report of all the spyware on your system. You can easily choose to leave certain programs installed. You might want to do this, for instance, because many free programs (such as Kazaa) will not work without their embedded spyware. If you’re the curious type and like to poke under the covers, Spy Sweeper will give you a brief description directly in the window, along with a “more details” button that will bring up an informative description of the piece of software in question.

We ran Spy Sweeper on two heavily infected PCs running a variety of common applications. Spy Sweeper did not flag any legitimate applications as spyware. Spy Sweeper also performed excellently in our spyware effectiveness test, deteting 85% of the spyware we tested and disabling 69% of it. These results are actually lower than they were during our last test, presumably due to the amount of newer and more uncommon bait spyware we're now testing against.

Quarantine

So what happens if you do remove spyware and find out later that it was necessary to run one of your favorite applications? Spy Sweeper quarantines spyware in a special folder in case you’d like to recover it later.

Other Options

Spy Sweeper offers a variety of impressive options – in fact, far more than the average user would ever need.

You can specify scanning settings, such as which drives to scan or whether to skip large files. You can schedule scans to run in the background, for instance, at night when you are out of the office. This is particularly useful as other applications will run slowly while scanning is in progress.

The immunization functionality can be customized. You can activate or deactivate shields which will guard against home page hijackings, tracking cookies, and in-memory spyware. In particular, this last option could come in handy on slower computers, which need all the performance you can squeeze out of them.

Customer Support

Webroot provides excellent customer support and a "no questions asked" refund policy. In last month's review, we noted that we had received a number of complaints about their customer support, but the problems seem to have been resolved and we haven't received any complaints in the past four weeks.

Summary

While still providing good protection against spyware , Spy Sweeper's effectiveness seems to have lagged behind other products in the past several months. Nevertheless, it offers an excellent user interface and relatively frequent updates.

While the trial version includes a one-time update to the latest spyware definitions, we discovered that the subscription version found more spyware than the trial (including the stubborn "Opensite" spyware program). Furthermore, Webroot releases bi-weekly updates to combat the latest spyware, so if you want ongoing, hassle-free protection, we recommend the two-year subscription.

Purchase Price: $29.95 (1 year), $39.95 (2 years - 33% savings)
Free Trial: Yes

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