OK, I'm fairly new at requesting apps the right way. I searched the boards, nothing promising. I thought to just request an anti-spyware app, but I decided to take it a step further and search SourceForge. I found an app that looks promising, but I'm not so sure.
Program: Simple Machine Protect
License: GPL
Description: Simple Machine Protect is portable antivirus software for your Windows Operating System, build to remove certain variant of virus, worm, trojan and spyware from your computer. SMP was designed to be a simple, open source antivirus.
Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smpav/
My concern is the wording of "remove certain variant" - I wonder if it's like Microsoft's monthly malicious software removal tool in that it only removes one certain variant.
But it was the most promising thing I could find on SF searching for 'spyware' and then sorting by latest activity. There was a Linux-only project updated more recently, but that (Untangle) seems more of a firewall-type app.
I have no idea how to test how effective this software is to determine its viability for inclusion, but I think we ought to have some anti-spyware solution alongside ClamWin.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
It's freeware and not yet on the site however the software author has given permission a couple times now for it to be ported just we don't have the freeware support yet. Once we do I think Spybot is a great solution and its well used around the world and a proven product.
PortableApps.com Advocate
well nathan the problem with this app (as I was considering making a launcher for it) is that it's written in VisualBasic, which would require .net so it's not really a candidate yet.
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
VisualBasic != .NET, VB.NET requires .NET, however there are older versions of VB that are not dependent on the .NET framework. This version uses VB6.0 which is not a .NET version
The developer formerly known as ZGitRDun8705
Regarding VB, if I'd seen "VisualBasic.NET" it would have raised that red flag indeed, but since it didn't, I actually didn't think about the .NET version, so it didn't occur to me. I don't know what version it uses but defer to the user above, who seems to know.
And as for Spybot, yeah, it's OK. It really turned me off a few years ago when its update repositories were shut down and the solution was to "pick another one" or something. I'm sure it's resolved now, but as it was always slower than Ad-Aware and the interface was a little weird, I went back to Ad-Aware and never looked back. However, if Spybot's portable and/or can be legally ported, for a portable environment, I'd use it again. At home, I'm trying to keep as many apps "portable" on an external hard drive as possible, where appropriate (e.g. AVG over ClamWin since the latter doesn't have on-access protection). Spybot should be fine though.
Actually, the most recent versions of Ad-Aware have rather sucked in detection and the new interface is nothing more than resource hogging fancy graphics. I can't seem to find the report now, but i read an article that basically said as the interface got "fancier", detection rates and accuracy went down.
Spybot on the other hand has had decent detection rates all along and a simple interface. The issue with servers is long since resolved (i think). When that issue came up, I just switched to a different server and now out of force of habit always just download from that one.
The developer formerly known as ZGitRDun8705
I have on my laptops & pen drives as a backup.
I can't comment on how good it is because it has never found any problems for me and I have never seen any reviews about it.
, must be still somewhere in some forum some thread abt it.
What I found, it was using mainly some kind of heuristics, in fact no real database for the malware was in it. Might be different now.
OK, the commercial malware finders relay also more and more on heuristics , but still for many things some kind of database should be expected.
OK it will never make any problem, but the question is the healthy ballance between hundreds of megabytes of your ram being used by some antimalware and something beeing very small ,but does not find anything but the trojans from last week.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland