# Better than Spybot and Adaware



## theonetruewill (Jan 10, 2009)

Well if anyone has been around long enough to know me, they will also know that I used to be VERY into spyware removal etc until I started to slowly stop posting from about a year ago. Well seems I have been living under a rock because I have found what I personally believe to be the first program you should now use for spyware removal. I used to count on the golden oldies of Adaware and Spybot perhaps coupled with a few other branded ones (along with my usual Nod32 of course) but all failed against the onslaught I encountered at 9am this morning. After encountering a driveby download I started gettting alerts from zonealarm - never a good sign (I cut internet access immediately). Within minuted my PC was slowing down and the infection spreading. a further few minutes and I was forced to restart and found out the cause: a particularly virilant strain of Virtumonde that had caused multiple infiltrations (and a tough little bastard). I manually removed what I could find and used all the usual scanners but to no avail, nothing could fix it incluind the specific vundo fix tools. Explorer crashed every 10 seconds or so (infuriating). I even repaired the windows os in case it was some damage that could be reverted - but as I suspected this was fruitless. Finally I came across a reference to Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware being a fix.... what the hell was this? I thought at the time - some cheap rubbish probably. How wrong I was. 4 minutes of scan later computer fixed. Another 4 minutes and it fixed a longterm problem I had been having on my laptop that I should have formatted ages ago (hadn't been able to remove it/hadn't had the time to properly dig for it). It beats Spybot and Adaware on speed, finding and removal. I am amazed and from looking at other reviews a fair few others are too. Where the hell did this thing come from - it is fantastic (or maybe the other tools are just outdated now...) and I really thought for once I'd actually recommend spending some money on a decent pr....oh but wait, it's free  but I would pay for it if they asked


----------



## Kursah (Jan 10, 2009)

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware does rock man, it's free version is pretty decent, I'm actually considering paying for the upgraded version. But really the free version does a bangup job, I run that and Spybot, they both find different things, seems that's how it works with malware scanners, so I figure better to run two decent ones.

This program is DEFINATELY worth a download and install!


----------



## kenkickr (Jan 13, 2009)

Another utility I've been pretty happy with is A-Squared, http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/free/.  It will probably take as long to scan as an Antivirus scan but it is a very thorough scanning utility.


----------

