How to Blitz Viruses and Spyware for Free

It was a very dark night.  By which I mean it was quite bright outside and hot enough to have the window wide open.  This served only to prove that real nature has no sense of pathetic fallacy.

From my perspective, it was a dark night. My browser had been hi-jacked and spyware was streaming through the breech.  I ran the firewall that was supposed to be saving me from this kind of thing. It froze, locked out by the Trojan that had also sneaked through.

If I hadn't been so indignant, I would have cried.  I threw everything in my not inconsiderable cyber-arsenal at it, but to no avail.

In the end I had to swallow my pride and head into certain corners of the internet.  I entered under a pseudonym and asked for help. 

When you want to buy a car, there's no-one better to ask than a mechanic.  If you want to learn which is the best, most authentic Chinese restaurant in town, you ask the homesick Chinese students.  If you want to know how to protect your system from hackers, then the same reasoning applies.

After the trolling had finally abated, I was given two recommendations.  They both worked. I regained control of my computer and I've never lost it since.

I love the name.  I giggle every time I run it or recommend it to someone else.  I'm smirking right now.

It just says it!  It's an anti-spyware and it's super.  Both in the bravo and the heroic sense.  Even the acronym is great.  It's the SAS for your PC. 

SUPERAnti-Spyware was one of the free programs recommended to me that night.  I've been personally using it ever since and I sneak it onto every computer that I'm called to fix. 

It doesn't just go after spyware, but trojans, adware, worms and other kinds of nasty infections. The updates seem far more ahead of the game than any other like software that I've used, but only for spy and adware.

I'm not recommending this for clearing out your heavy duty viruses.  But I am there in the fan-club for using it to speed up your machine, because it's kicked out all of those companies watching everything that you do.

Malwarebytes have never claimed to be a front line defence.  The program exists more in a consultancy role. You run it to see how well your main firewall or anti-virus worked.

That said, I think that it sells itself short. It performs much better than many of the front line, brand name defenders. I've consistently had times when it's this anti-malware which saved my computer.  It reacted before anything else did.

MalwareGeek's review video demonstrates this perfectly.  It's a little long, but very much worth watching.  He runs the program alongside his main anti-virus, just to see the results when he repeatedly attempts to infect his system.

I've also witnessed Malwarebytes' anti-malware work extremely well in another context.  I play a lot of Runescape and there was a period when some very convincing phishing e-mails were being sent around. Several friends fell for it and their accounts were taken.  Their PCs were loaded with keyloggers.

There was a lot of scope here to see what failed.  It became my standard first question, "What firewall have you got?"  

It was only Malwarebytes which found that keylogger.  For those already infected, I recommended that they download this.  The malicious program was uniformly found and destroyed.

As those who watched MalwareGeek's review will know, this anti-malware does not perform well with zero day viruses and trojans.  (Those only created within the past 48 hours.)  But beyond that, I personally think it's the best free program out there for doing what it does.