Free Antispyware Myths

Churning out antispyware applications has become a golden mine for numerous scammers and money-hunters. The on-going buzz all over the Internet just never stops; looks like having antispyware installed is of same importance as education.

Years ago spyware was a new term in the language to describe malicious programs used by marketing companies to collect various types of data about watched computers. Online shops visited and payment methods used, interested to ads and favorite movies, - spyware gathered all that and other information to later transmit it to remote servers for statistical analysis. For marketers, this statistics was of high value; knowing what people search for and how they interact with ads meant providing them with better targeted campaigns and customer-oriented services.

But time passing by, spyware gradually spread itself to include various types of threats presented online. Inside the "spyware" concept you'd find rootkits, hidden registry entries, browser hijacks, unstoppable pop-ups, smitfraud infections, phishing etc. In fact, there now exists a more convenient term to refer to web dangers - malware. But because spyware has existed for so long, it's now common to use this word to address web threats with quite different nature and goals.

Hence the related myths.

A lot of PC owners believe that free antispyware equals its paid counterparts except that it costs nothing. This is wrong; the majority of legitimate free antispyware programs are feature-limited or time-limited (as in case with trial versions).

Freeware programs are insanely popular not only because of their cost, but also because they often provide better functionality than commercial software. You will find office suites and CD/DVD recording software, data recovery, restore and backup programs, email and FTP clients, wallpaper changers and desktop enhancers available at no cost. Hence the illusion that free antispyware is just as easy to find and use. But this is far from being true. Most dangerous malware is built into innocently looking and appealing "free antispyware software". There's a whole segment of the market offering "free scanners". The catch is that those scanners don't remove what they detect – they ask you to purchase a license key to remove pests. And yet another catch is that detected threats can be fakes. Yes, imitating infections to show a scan result is a popular approach to make the user push the "Buy" button and reveal credit card number. Finding a safe, legitimate, free antispyware scanner with removal option is not an easy task. A safe approach here would be to make some sort of investigation before downloading and installing any given free antispyware. There's a huge risk hidden in the word "free".

Another common misconception is that free antispyware differs from commercial programs in cost only. But the difference lies deeper than that. Very few applications will provide real-time protection – as the name implies, it is the key to staying safe. Automatic downloading of definitions is not common in free antispyware either. Free scanners often detect fewer types of malware. Antivirus modules that now are built into popular antispyware programs are never part of free software. In general, free antispyware usually exists as trial versions of commercial software (e.g. Sunbelt CounterSpy) or as on-demand scanners (e.g. Malwarebyte's anti-malware, SUPERAntiSpyware Free, etc.)

Any chosen free security program can be discontinued by the manufacturer without notice. Using an unsupported antispyware potentially leaves a system unprotected. The more time has passed since last update, the more vulnerable to newest threats a PC becomes.

On the other hand, even savvy web surfers believe that antispyware protection is more of a trend and not a necessity. They install antivirus and never care about antispyware shield because don't consider it important. Studies show however that virus attacks and danger they cause come relatively insignificant when compared to results of spyware infection. Stolen credit cards numbers, systems slowed down to a crawl, corrupt registry and Windows BSOD's are common outcomes for a computer with insufficient yet free antispyware protection.