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Rich & NAG: Regarding prevention we have been focusing on education, mainly telling our clients and friends to resist the urge to download and install freebies from the Internet. Applications like file-sharing software and free weather notification-area applets seem to be primary targets for "extra-baggage". It's been our experience that as we succeed in educating users in this way spy-ware has not been a very big problem for us. The media publicity and general fear in the population regarding spy-ware has been a great help in supporting us in this area. Users have been very receptive to our suggestions! Cheers, Brian Hoort 517.432.0242 [log in to unmask] ________________________________ From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Wiggins Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 8:28 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Are any commercial anti-virus products now adequate for anti-spyware? Thanks to everyone for your thoughts.... Let me clarify my question: assume you are giving advice to MSU students, or to people in MSU departments who do not have managed desktops, or, for that matter, to your friends and relatives. What combination of anti-virus and anti-spyware would you suggest? Is there an anti-virus product on the market today that you think would be adequate both for its anti-virus features, and as a good-enough general purpose anti-spyware tool? The primary focus of my query is prevention, not eradication, though of course that's important as well... Thanks, /rich On 4/19/06, Erik Selke <[log in to unmask]> wrote: In my experience, NOD32 does a much better job of blocking spyware before it is installed than SAV10. We do nightly scans with Spybot S&D. You can setup a scheduled task to do this very easily. The command line switches are all in the help system. If you pay for Ad-Aware SE Plus, you can do the same. It makes a world of difference. Erik Peter J Murray wrote: > NOD32 picks up most spyware, as does SAV10. With Firefox in use a lot > here (it really makes a difference), we really don't have much of a > spyware problem, but when we do, I use Ad-Aware and Spybot (with > Ad-Aware, it's important to boot into safe mode and do a full system > scan, it finds much more in full scan mode). I've also found that a > little bit of education (such as avoiding certain websites and not > installing things) helps a lot. > > PM > > Richard Wiggins wrote: >> Do any of you now regard any anti-virus products or suites as >> sufficient for anti-spyware purposes? >> >> The most recent reading I have on what folks in NAG and on the Net say >> is that you need a specialized anti-spyware tool (on Windows >> computers) and that it's best to use two tools at once. >> >> Now the anti-virus vendors are offering anti-spyware components. >> Would you still advise users of these updated products to use an >> anti-spyware tool as well? >> >> I notice that Webroot's SpySweeper appears to be moving from a >> freeware tool with for-pay enhanced version, to purely commercial. >> What are you advising your users? >> >> Thanks, >> >> /rich > -- Erik Selke Information Technologist Department of Sociology 316 Berkey Hall Michigan State University [log in to unmask] (517) 353-1804