We have been dealing with a lot of spyware and adware at work and I was put in charge of finding something to fend them off. Over the course of my investigation I found out that there are over 75,000 knows spyware programs out there. And here is the interesting part. If you run Windows XP, you have at least 2 running on your computer all the time.
IE uses a module from the
Alexa Toolbar for searching purposes. While this really doesn't do anything, almost all anti-spyware programs will find it as spyware.
Also, Media Player has a module that gets recognized as spyware/adware. When you run media player it goes out and checks for updates automatically and sends information to MS. This is really all spyware/adware does. So it gets caught by most anti-spyware applications.
There are also Keyloggers (Trillian uses a keylogger that is non malicious) and Cookies that can gather and send information in a malicious manner. Tracking cookies specifically (they're not just for storing passwords anymore).
PestPatrol is the best thing I have found. And for around $40 is well worth the money. It has 4 parts.
1. Scanner - This scans the system and looks for installed spyware, adware, and cookies
2. Keylogscanner - This scans specifically for keyloggers
3. CookieMonitor - This runs all the time and monitors IE cookies and removes them automatically as soon as they are dropped. You can enable a sound affect for this. It's interesting to here it when you go to web sites. When I go to MSNBC.com I here the thing bleep like 15 times at me removing cookies. FYI - This only works for IE cookies.
4. MemScanner - This runs all the time and looks for knows malicious processes to startup in memory and instantly kills them. This is awesome.
PestPatrol is also the only product I can find that actually is network aware and will allow central administration on a server for all your network workstations. Also, I ran an
Adaware scan and it found and removed some files from my PC. I then ran PestPatrol and it found 9 more items.