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Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 6REVIEW DATE: 21-JUL-2008  For such a big release, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 6 is surprisingly free of wild new features. Instead, PC Tools has concentrated on enhancements that that are hidden from view, making the app better at detecting threat variants while still using minimal system resources, and at cleaning up heavily infested systems. It takes advantage of Vista features to protect itself more strongly from direct attack by malware. Most significant is the fact that it now integrates the company's ThreatFire technology in the form of an add-on called Behavior Guard. Altogether these changes add up to the most potent antispyware app I've tested against my current batch of malware—an app that's a worthy successor to PC Magazine's previous Editors' Choice, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 5.5.Getting Started
SDAV6 installation takes quite a while, mainly because the signature database isn't included in the installer; hence the app always downloads the full signature database during installation. As PC Tools' CEO Simon Clausen explains, this ensures that the product's protection is as strong as possible from the very start. To speed the install process even on malware-infested systems, the company raises the installer process's priority. Even with that priority boost, the entire process of setting up a new installation can take as much as 10 or 15 minutes, especially if the signature download is interrupted and has to restart (which happened several times). After the installer finishes, it runs what they call a "smart update" just in case the program itself needs updating. And after you enter your registration code, it again checks for any updates to features available only to registered users.
SDAV6 jumps into action even before it finishes these program updates. On some test systems, its start-up memory cleaner wiped out a number of threats before the updates even finished. It requested a reboot to finish the job; I waited until the update finished. This start-up scan was effective: It foiled one threat that actively prevents installation of many security products. I didn't install Behavior Guard on these systems, since its emphasis is prevention, not removal. Scanning on my resource-poor malware-infested virtual machine test systems took a long, long time: nearly 2 hours in some cases. But it turns out the fault was partly mine. Thinking to make the scan more effective, I turned on an option entitled "Scan for rootkit hidden files." According to Clausen, this is almost never necessary and can double the scan time. You'd actually probably use it only when advised to do so by tech support. Indeed, when I retested without that option, the cleanup was just as effective and quite a bit faster. It still took nearly an hour, but in every case it managed to complete its cleanup without requiring extreme measures like scanning in Safe Mode. It rebooted or rebooted and rescanned as necessary to complete the cleanup. A full scan of my standard clean test system was much quicker—just a bit over half an hour.The results were worth the wait. Spyware Doctor detected every single one of the malware samples and successfully removed all but one of them. As always, I define successful removal to mean that all executable files were removed, but Spyware Doctor goes well beyond this minimal requirement. In most cases it removed almost every trace of the malware threats. On this test it scored 9.8 out of 10, better than any other product I've tested with this particular collection of malware. That's significantly better than the next-highest score of 9.3 for Ad-Aware 2008 Pro. Competitor Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware and Firewall (WAVASF) was last reviewed with a different sample set; when I retested with this current set for comparison, WAVASF scored 8.3 of 10 points.On a separate test against installed commercial keyloggers instead of malware, Spyware Doctor wasn't as effective. It didn't detect two of the samples at all, and it failed to completely remove several others, scoring 6.8 out of 10. WAVASF topped this test with 7.3 of 10, the same score achieved by a-squared Emergency USB Stick. Remember, however, that I attach much less weight to the keylogger test: If someone can access your computer and install a commercial keylogger, you've got bigger problems than a security app can solve.—Next: Clean-System Protection
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Data Protection Virtual Tradeshow
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