Best Defenders

Test Report: Spy Sweeper Leads the Field in Spyware Cleanup (chart)

PC World challenged 11 anti-spyware programs--five paid stand-alone apps, three free stand-alone ones, and three internet security suites--to clean up 73 components spawned by major spyware programs. Webroot came in first, eliminating 90 percent of these components. Panda came in second among all the apps but first among the three suites, removing 86 percent of the components.

How We Test: We performed testing on a 2.93-GHz Pentium 4 Acer Power FV computer running Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 1. (We used this version of Windows instead of Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2, because the latter impacted the speed of our tests without making any changes to the protection offered by the anti-spyware products tested.) We collected dozens of spyware programs for our tests. These programs created 73 key components in our tests. The spyware components break down into processes that run actively in memory, modify Internet Explorer search and home pages, add toolbars and browser helper objects (BHOs), and alter Registry run keys and Windows services. We challenged the anti-spyware applications' ability to detect the components and processes and clean them up.

To get an idea of how well the anti-spyware programs deal with new and unknown spyware attacks, we also checked to see how they would deal with spyware-like behavior. We created an application to perform several actions typical of spyware and adware installations, including adding Registry run keys, dropping a file in the Windows startup folder, changing the browser start and search pages, and overwriting the Hosts file. We checked each anti-spyware application's ability to detect and block these activities.