Spybot-S&D news

Warning! Vipre forces to uninstall Spybot-S&D!

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200

The current version of Vipre Antivirus from Sunbelt Software is forcing to uninstall Spybot-S&D during their own installation process. But there are no known compatibility problems.

You can avoid the uninstall in their installation wizard by pressing "Next" instead of "Go to uninstall" or "Show me how". Then you will be asked "There are other Antivirus products still installed on your computer. Are you sure you want to continue?" There press "Yes", then Spybot-S&D will stay on your computer.

In case you have uninstalled Spybot with Vipre, to get Spybot - Search & Destroy back, we recommend a fresh installation of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2.

That is the same marketing behaviour that McAfee and Kaspersky uses to kick competitors out of the business. Please do also have a look at this link on our homepage.

Announcing our new Bootable CD: Spybot - Search & Destroy Personal Edition

Wed, 19 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce our latest tool against rootkits and really tough malware. We have created a bootable CD, the Spybot-S&D Personal Edition, using Microsoft^® Windows 7^® combined with our popular anti spyware tool. Using our new edition you can

Boot from the CD to start a clean Windows 7^® (limited to the use of Spybot-S&D tools)
Remove malware that cannot be cleaned from within a running system
Easily update to our latest malware signatures via Internet or memory drives before starting a scan, even though you are booting from a read-only media
Use Spybot-S&D on computers without prior installation

The bootable CD comes with a printed Quickstart Guide and is easy to use: Just insert the CD into the drive of your computer, adjust the boot sequence if needed and on next system start the CD will be booted. Shortly after Spybot-S&D will update itself and then offer you to scan your computer for malware and Trojan horses. This way it is possible to save even Microsoft^® Windows^® installations that cannot be repaired from within the running system.

You can commission your copy of Spybot-S&D Personal Edition for private use via our order form. Please use the licenses form for questions about this product. We are looking forward to your order!

Warning - False Positive! McAfee detects parts of Spybot-S&D as Trojan Horse!

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

With recent virus definitions (5938, 2-Apr-2010), McAfee detects the SDShred.exe of Spybot Search & Destroy as Generic.dx!qln (Trojan).

This is a false positive from McAfee that has already been fixed. Please search for new updates (5940, 3-Apr-2010 or later) for your McAfee version.

In case McAfee has deleted any of our files, to get Spybot - Search & Destroy back, please uninstall, then download a fresh copy of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 and install it.

Supported browsers

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Updating the help file for 2.0, we created a list of browers currently supported (for immunization and restricted access shortcuts) by Spybot - Search & Destroy, which we want to share with you. Where we list product versions, those are the ones we tested against; other versions are likely to be supported as well if changes are not too big. Unlisted browsers that are clones of listed browsers are also likely to be supported (e.g. most IE based browsers and many Google Chrome variants use the same cache location and formats).

Internet Explorer & clones

Acoo
Avant
Internet Explorer (4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x)
Lunascape (5.x, 6.x)
Maxthon

Mozilla based browsers

Beonex
Firebird (early versions of Firefox)
Firefox (also mobile application)
Flock
K-Meleon
Lolifox
Lunascape (5.x, 6.x)
Postbox
Netscape (4.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x)
SeaMonkey (also mobile application)
Songbird 2
Thunderbird
Qtrax
Wyzo

Opera browsers

Opera (4, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x, 10.x)

Webkit based browsers

Apple Safari
Chrome Plus (Chromium based, also mobile application)
Google Chrome (Chromium based, also mobile application)
Lunascape (5.x, 6.x)
SRWare Iron (Chromium based, also mobile application)

Other browsers

Amaya

If you know more browsers yet unlisted here, send us a tweet @SpybotSD!

Warning - False Positive! Avast detects parts of Spybot-S&D as Trojan Horse!

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Avast Antivirus, with database update (VPS: 091203-0, 12/03/2009), detects our software Spybot-S&D and some of its files as the trojan Win32:Delf-MZG.

This is a false positive and it has already been fixed by Avast. Please update your Avast from the previous version (issue 091203-0) to the updated one (091203-1). Then update the program itself (from version 4.8.1356 to 4.8.1368). Restart your computer as requested, and the false positive should be fixed.

More details can be found in discussions at our forum and at the Avast forum.

In case Avast has deleted any of our files, to get Spybot - Search & Destroy back, please uninstall according to this guide, then download a fresh copy of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 here.

Be at the pulse of Spybot-S&D development!

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0200

You can now get the latest news live from our lead developer Patrick Kolla. How? You can follow us on Twitter!

http://twitter.com/SpybotSD

Using twitter, you will be informed about the latest developments and updates. You can catch a look behind the scenes, see which projects we are working on at the moment and which urgent problems we are dealing with.

Are you a Twitter user? Then come and follow us!

Internet Explorer 8 issues

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Various reports from the Internet and from our own testing seem to indicate that there is a problem between Internet Explorer 8 and the immunization feature of Spybot - Search & Destroy causing a slow startup of IE 8.

Seeing all those different opinions floating around, we want to clarify what the Immunization feature does. It is one level of our protection that does protect you even if Spybot-S&D is completely shut down. This is possible by using the browsers own lists for blocked sites, by filling them with a huge list of bad sites known to us. And Internet Explorer, starting with version 8, seems to have problems with huge amounts of sites added there.

Critics say that this kind of protection is not that good because recent malware sometimes uses new servers every day even, but then, this is just one layer of our protection. Our Internet Explorer plugin is better able to deal with these, but we feel that's not the point.

Quality assurance is a very important factor of software development, and unoptimized list handling is the probable cause for most performance issues. Whenever software does support lists of data that are not fixed in size, but where the size, like in this case, is open to the user, software tests should include performance tests on huge amounts of data. And usually, it's really just choosing a better algorithm for searches, for example.

Granted, at times a release is pressing and testing gets neglected and not as detailed as it should be - it never is. We know that quite well ourselves: just a few months ago we did slow down IE through our own plugin because we did not expect users to have tens of thousands of cookies at the same time. Did we expect users to cut down on their cookies? No. If you offer a feature, like Microsoft offers to put websites into a Restricted Zone, then please try to support in all ways the users might use it.

Update: Microsoft finally released a fix for this issue. The update has been released on June 9th. If you experienced problems with IE8 and Spybot's immunization, please download the update "KB969897" via the Windows updates or download your copy directly at Microsoft.

Customer feedback, part two

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Our last news entry informed you about our efforts to address the most important issues our users have quickly. The new TeaTimer update mentioned back then is in todays updates, just update as usually.

More feedback we have analyzed so far includes Spybot-S&D starting up a scan on system start all the time on some machines, which we try to address with todays updates from the detection database side, reducing the chance that detections need a scan on reboot, and for which we have a beta version (SpybotSD.exe and advcheck.dll, note these files are for experienced users only and do not contain a full Spybot-S&D installation package) for affected people to help gathering more details (new logfile named Run Entry History.txt).

When letting Spybot-S&D look for updates on program start on Vista, some users experience the message Please select some updates first, which can be a bit confusing. A beta SDUpdate.exe is now available for that problem.

The installer file that is downloaded to the desktop during a main update (to allow you to see the file and store it elsewhere if you want) is now named setup-spybotsd162.exe instead of spybotsd162.exe to avoid confusion with the regular Spybot... start link.

We'll continue to analyze feedback for ways to improve of course.

User feedback

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Users uninstalling Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 have the option to anonymously submit a reason for doing so, and after a few weeks of these reports, we were able to get a picture of the most common reasons.

The top reasons why people uninstall Spybot-S&D are those three malicious antivirus companies who force their users to uninstall our software for so-called, but never proven, incompatibility issues. Against these, all we can do is continuing down the legal road, and the feedback at least helps us getting more exact numbers.

Among the reasons we can address, the TeaTimer messages were mentioned quite often as too confusing. TeaTimer already knows about half a million regular system entries, and more than a third of a million malware detection patterns - but the remaining ones can still confuse unexperienced users. We've therefore decided to heed this feedback and made the decision dialogs on unknown entries optional in a new TeaTimer version now available as beta.

Of course you do not need to uninstall just to give us feedback - just visit our forum or send us an email if you feel things could be made better!

Update to 1.6.2 finally there

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The probably last maintenance release of Spybot-S&D 1.6.2 is finally ready, available starting today on the first mirrors, with more becoming available as they're added. It will also be available through the integrated updater soon after it is online completely.

Among its bugfixes and new features are support for the latest Opera releases, support for Googles new browser Chrome, fixed support for fresh older Firefox installations, improved support for fast user switching while Spybot is running, plus a few more bugfixes.

A preview of Spybot 2.0 will also be available as soon as servers have adjusted to the additional 1.6.2 release load.