April 20th, 2005
Symantec test results
As promised yesterday, I have results for the test I put Symantec’s new antispyware product through. I used the same test file that we used in our second Spyware Obstacle Course, which contained the following eight nasties: 180Search Assistant, BargainBuddy, BookedSpace, DownloadWare, eXact Search Bar, PerfectNav, Lycos Sidesearch, and Zserv. Of these it found and removed four: 180Search Assistant, BargainBuddy, BookedSpace, and eXact Search Bar. It also found something it called Web Bar, which may have been another name for one of the installed adware components. Since it doesn’t show the location of the spyware it finds, I couldn’t confirm its results. It did require a restart to remove everything, which I found kind of annoying. But overall I thought it gave a decent showing for a beta product. I’m glad Symantec is working on spyware, as people who use Symantec’s Internet Security product will find it a welcome addition.
