Spybot-S&D news

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!

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.

Detection range doubled in the past six months

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

We're nearing the end of the year, Spybot-S&D 1.6 is out for about half a year now, and 2.0 is nearing beta. An important part of our 2.0 preparations of course evaluating where we could do better, we dug through a heap of statistics, and wanted so share a nice one with you:

Spybot-S&D 1.6 already improved the scan speed a lot, still, people complain about the time a full system scan takes again. This graph shows a "nice" explanation: the number of detection patterns used to detect malware has doubled since the release of 1.6 in July this year, to 343,003 detection patterns in this weeks update.

The graphs first steep increase can be explained with the addition of detections that needed the new capabilities of the 1.6 engine, and should you wonder about the following valley, that was a point where the new capabilities were used to reduce the amount of patterns needed, without actually reducing the detection range.

Conclusion? We have a massively improved detection range, and we're going to improve the scanning time this costs in 2.0 to counter the negative side (speed) of it.

Software of the Year 2008

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

This week, we're proud to report about a special event we visited last week. We get our share of "virtual" prizes and are proud about them, but they can't beat a physical trophy, which, sitting always present on a shelf, is a very nice sign of bundled encouraging appreciation by you, our users.

Last week, Deutsche Telekom's download portal softwareload.de presented the results of their Software of the Year 2008 survey in thirteen categories, and Spybot - Search & Destroy made the Gold prize as best Freeware, personally presented in 14 pounds of glass that'll look quite impressive among its colleagues. We thank all users who have voted in our favour there, even though we were lazy enough to not even advertise the voting here.

We're not just sitting on these merits of course, but are working hard on Spybot-S&D 2.0. We've justed added a screenshot gallery to the already existing weekly blog and project tools milestone for those curious about the future.

Malware Removal Guides

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

This weeks news start with our forums new Malware Removal Guides part. As you hopefully have noticed, we try to write down a few sentences about each threat Spybot-S&D detects. Thinking on how we could improve that service in preparation for Spybot-S&D 2.0, we decided to add more information. Removal guides are surely not a new idea, and not all can be really complete, since malware likes to use hiding methods that make them difficult to detect, and textual explanations already start to lack when it comes to randomized filenames. Still, some information is better than none, and we decided we'll just try and give our best in describing manual removal. Rolling out hundreds, if not thousands of guides will take a few days, maybe weeks, but you can already see the first ones here and comment here.

The Spybot 2.0 blog also has a new entry on usability for error handling concepts.

An outlook at Spybot 2.0

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Spybot 2.0: Patrick Kolla, our chief software engineer, has started a series of small blog posts on features of Spybot-S&D 2.0, starting with a blog post about modularization, with more entries on various other topics already waiting in queue.

Recommendations: our page with recommendations about security software has been out of date for a while, so we decided to go ahead and rewrite it. You can view the new article here and comment on our blog here.

The Wiki, a new FileAlyzer, Downloads...

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0200

SpybotWiki: our wiki, which has been restricted to logins of forum users until the OpenSBI system was finished, is now open to all readers, forum account or not. Stay tuned for the final release of OpenSBI!

FileAlyzer 2: a first beta release of our file analysis tool created to help you understanding various file formats, and designed to support OpenSBI, is now available as the first of our tools to reach version 2.0. It's new multi-file interface allows you to easily compare multiple files, all detail pages have been updated to make use of XP/Vista style controls when available, and its speed has been improved to show up without delays now.

Download portal: now if you are wondering where to download FileAlyzer 2, or other betas, previews and smaller downloads, we have a new download portal available that replaces many download links on the website and in scattered forum posts. The FileAlyzer download page there is a good example for the useful details we added to most downloads - screenshots, supported Operating Systems, and hashes to verify your download.