I Spy

Spyware, that inherently evil beast lurking out on the Internet, turns out to actually be very controllable with the appropriate software steps.

First, of course, is quit running that screen door on the front of your computer known as Internet Explorer. Switching to Firefox pretty much single-handedly stopped any spyware from appearing on my computers that I use.

Next, keep an anti-spyware program around, just in case. I have ran various versions of these over the years (all free of course, the pay spyware program are often spyware themselves, or simply don't offer any benefits over free). I initially used AdAware, and then later added in Spybot Search and Destroy to pick up some that AdAware missed. However, when Microsoft bought Giant and released their product as Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta, I switched to that and never looked back.

Microsoft (actually Giant)'s product had a much simpler user-interface, found 100% of the spyware, including some the others missed, and generally seemed to just work. Being a beta, there were some things I didn't like of course. Navigating in the UI was sometimes non-obvious. Mostly I didn't like that if you were running a scan and decided to change an option, it stopped the scan. Also, Microsoft obviously hadn't fully integrated the code, as it still showed up in process explorer as Giant Antispyware and the look and feel was theirs.

Yesterday though, Microsoft released beta 2 of the product, and it is now renamed to Microsoft Defender. A bit of an ambiguous name, but I like the product a lot. It now looks, feels, and behaves like a Windows product (a good thing in this case). The user-interface is now very simple and easy to use, and overall it is very nicely integrated and automated. It can just sit there and do its job like I want. I recommend installing it. It is one of the downloads that require verifying that you have a "Genuine Windows" installation, but that isn't a big deal. Microsoft now even provides a nice helper application to allow validation while running Firefox.

Finally, since this has turned into a bit of a Internet protection post, I would recommend running AVG as an anti-virus program. Yes, viruses are not the big of an issue, since I don't run untrusted programs. However, I get enough emails with viruses in them, that it is nice to have AVG take care of that for me. There are probably other good free virus scanners, but overall I prefer AVG.