CounterSpy end of life occurred on June 1st. I saw a post from someone whose company runs both a commercial antivirus product and CounterSpy. They were wondering what secondary product they could replace it with. I’m having flashbacks to 2007.
In the mid-part of last decade mainstream antivirus products were slow to adjust to the onset of spyware. User’s computers would routinely get loaded down with browser toolbars and software that would serve ads, hijack pages and steal data. To combat this, products like PestPatrol and Webroot Spysweeper were deployed in the enterprise. (CounterSpy came out just after I made a purchasing decision so it wasn’t evaluated).
Eugene Kaspersky wrote, “there is no such thing as spyware”. He branded “spyware” a marketing term designed to sell new product when your existing anti-malware solution should be enough. It was a controversial stance if only because the major antivirus venders in the US at the time were playing wait and see. The few of them that stuck their toe in the water by detecting adware/spyware were sued. The terms of service were plain as day the plaintiffs argued.
Eventually we got to a point when, in my opinion, antispyware became redundant. I’m surprised to see anyone still WANTING to implement/manage a second anti-mailware product, and that users would accept that overhead. I think if you need a second anti-malware product, then the first isn’t doing very good job.
From the GFI link, it looks like they are offering free upgrades to VIPRE. In the forum, it sounds like you could use that as a scheduled scan but you wouldn’t want to run two real-time antivirus scans at once.
Obviously I think a single antimalware solution is more than capabile. If yours isn’t, I would suggest looking at alternatives such as VIPRE, SOPHOS, and Symantec Endpoint Protection.
A more complimentary add-on would be url blacklisting. I’ve written before about how a product like BlueCoat ProxyClient extends filtering to the laptops when they are outside the corporate network. Some anti-malware products may even have something like that natively.
What do you think? Are secondary scanners necessary for every day use?
