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We've had sucess with Pestpatrol Corporate Edition. http://www.pestpatrol.com/Products/PestPatrolCE/

See: here for Pest Patrol, and here for Spy Sweeper. There was an article this month in Information Security Magazine.

Someone got into my pc using the LPD Root Exploit. Of course, I was stupid enough to put a Linux box on the Internet with no firewall! Still my personal experience from that time was the Linux had a problem!

Here's a fact for you. It's important to understand that just because you think something has no spyware in it, doesn't mean it's safe.

http://pestpatrol.com/pestinfo/w/w32sup.asp

After installing all the appropriate device drivers, the first ten items on my list would be -

1. Symantec Drive Image 2. OpenOffice.org 3. Sygate Personal Firewall Pro 4. NOD32 Anti-Virus 5. PestPatrol 6. iolo System Mechanic 7. WinRAR 8. Mozilla Firefox 9. UltraEdit 10. Nero Burning ROM

You are mistaken, Spybot Search and Destroy *IS NOT* spyware.

Here is a list of *SAFE* Adaware and Spyware removal tools.

*Free*

Spybot Search and Destroy
Adaware

*Not Free but Good*

Pest Patrol

You mean this WildTangent? I have no interest in the views of this builder of adware.

Ah....for all of you who are going to continue jumping in with "1 in 20? more like 1 in 1..." without reading the article...

The "1 in 20" figure the researchers got was not from scanning the HDDs with Spybot/AdAware/etc....they sniffed for known packets from FOUR of the significantly more than four known malwares.

So, to be detected at all, the machines had to be running and the spyware loaded and actively broadcasting packets during the sampling period. Given this lack of an exhaustive check, the 1 in 20 figure doesn't surprise me. (We all know it is 1 in 1... :-)

I can only pray this comes true. I do unoffical tech support for our little (30 person) medical office. We do have an "real" IT department, but they are 1/2 mile away, and come only once a week, appointment needed. Recently we've been overrun by this piece of crapware called N-Case . This thing corrupts registry's, take over settings, and generally has been the biggest pain in my existance. We have had to reformat three machines just to get it off. Almost univerally it has been installed by someone clicking on a pop up to "Rid your machine of spyware".

I think anyone who writes this type of software should be sentenced to 20 years hard labor, or AOL dialup for the rest of their natural lives

The javascript looks pretty innocuous. You can use the samspade safe browser if you really want to look at the original page (and the javascript).

Some AV programs throw a warning about Bt.ow/btg when they see the pattern "Second Part to Hell" and the page includes the text "(c) 2002-2004 by Second Part To Hell" so it may be a false positive.

If you are concerned, more information about Bt.ow/btg is here and here

Though I am loath to point traffic to this idiot, Steve Gibson's Site gives an interesting, though sensational story of being a DDoS victim (this guy is by and large full of shit, but he does tell a pretty decent story)

I hope this helped clarify things a bit, though if you'd like first-hand experience with zombie networks and the kiddies who run them, I would suggest visiting EFnet

It does not (as Kazaa does) tell us how many people are currently on-line. They claim 15,000,000 (whereas Kazaa routinely has about 3,000,000 at any given time) -- but no proof.

It requires reboots to install and uninstall. This is going overboard -- ZoneAlarm installs a service, and does not require rebooting after installation.

I set it to put my files (both incoming and shared) on my G: drive, and it's downloading to my K: drive (where the OS is installed). The G: drive have 6 GB free so it can hold a few movies -- but the K: drive only has 80 MB free, so it's going to fill up in a few minutes and I'll let you know how it handles the error condition.

I don't see a whole lot of content on the system, either. (I wouldn't be surprised if I had been keylogged. Good thing I run ZoneAlarm!)

Well, I didn't wait for it to fill up the drive as it started to slow down after a period of time. So I exited it, uninstalled it, then ran Ad-Aware. Lo and behold, Ad-Aware found some spyware.

Mostly it was "navexcel" which I don't know much about but here are some links: PestPatrol knows about it; there's a forum discussing it, and another here ; and perhaps more but I couldn't find them...

Antivirus software just cannot detect it.
That's because you gave permission to install it via some sneaky click-wrap license. You know, those ones you never read? AV companies have the technology, but they would probably get their pants sued off if they called another company's product malicious when it was merely annoying or nosy--and when the user supposedly consented to it being there.

The wintel world (win9x) needs something that can get Gator and friends out the door.
There are plenty of them already, like Pest Patrol, Spybot S&D, and Ad Aware.

There's a lot of good information on spyware at Doxdesk and Spyware Info.

No, it means that spyware research groups are forbidden to package "specimens" on disks or Web sites and pass them around.