Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition

Spyware is a term used to refer to any program installed on a computer without the user's knowledge to perform a function that the user would not otherwise allow. The lion's share of spyware comes in the form of data mining cookies that track surfing habits to report them back to their progenitors. Thankfully, these are most often aggregate data collectors that do not tie information they have harvested to specific users, though the threat is there. Even more severe threats to both privacy and security from spyware come in the form of dial-out programs, page redirects and keystroke loggers. Newer users with less than advisable surfing habits may even find their PC has become sluggish and unstable merely because of the amount of unwanted processes running at all times.

Ad-Aware, developed by German and Swedish outfit Lavasoft, is a resource for discovering spyware running unnoticed on a machine. The latest free version of Ad-Aware is Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition. It follows the model of anti-virus applications in not only cataloguing known threats but looking out for suspicious behavior in unrecognized running processes (using what Lavasoft has ostentatiously dubbed Code Sequence Identification).

Ad-Aware offers an easy to follow interface that will be familiar to anyone used to running AV software:

A system scan takes approximately 10-15 minutes. On my system, Ad-Aware SE Personal found a depressing 98 suspicious items:



All were simple data mining cookies, and all were found in Internet Explorer's cache. This is particularly telling for two reasons:

1. I use Opera. I only use IE when checking how a page I'm building looks across browsers or when trying to replicate a user's problem in my tech support job.

2. I ran a previous version of Ad-Aware, version 6.0, three days ago and found only five suspicious objects.

Use of Internet Explorer is not advisable.

After finding the suspicious objects, the user must click the checkbox beside each object to quarantine it. This can be a laborious task, and the application's user interface would be much improved by a "check all" feature. From this screen, it's just one click to quarantine the selected items. Quarantined objects should be prevented from running at this point, though the user may further choose to delete the batch or restore it if something benign was kaboshed:



The whole process took 3 clicks, if you don't count the 97 it took to select the cookies (I left one from my bank). Previous quarantines may be accessed from Ad-Aware's logs. Lavasoft offers some add-on features, including AdWatch real-time scanner and HexDump hexadecimal translator, but not all of these are free.

It should be noted that many users report that the similar program Spybot Search & Destroy (which does offer free real-time scanning) will often find programs that Ad-Aware doesn't, and vice versa. Running both of these applications together, and regularly, is highly advisable.