Spyware blockers. Choosing and Using Spyware Blockers

You have a significant challenge right now: You need to choose a good Spyware Blockers program. In this time standards for what good Spyware Blockers software should do are still taking shape, and few good reviews comparing the products are available. In fact, this market is so young that the terminology is still pretty fluid, and different products may refer to the same feature with different names.

Because there’s such variance in terminology and function at this point, you need more than the typical one-page, product-feature glossies to figure out what each product is doing. Most likely, you need to demo each product to understand the features they tout and whether the features are meaningful to you.
Spyware blockers category covers ten major players on the spyware-blocking market today. You can find details about their features, costs, makers, and more. You can use this knowledge to begin your search for a spyware blocker that will suit your business needs and budget.

Understanding the Spyware Blockers market

The Spyware Blockers market is changing rapidly. Not long ago, Spyware Blockers programs were the fruit of a new cottage industry. Literally dozens of so-called spyware-blocking programs have been available for free, and some of the better programs have fee-based models with even more features.
Still, as we write this, few Spyware Blockers have true big-company features, such as central control and management, reporting, and hands-free operation for users (so you won’t need to remind them to download new updates or manually scan for spyware). By the time you read this, the stronger Spyware Blockers programs, such as Ad-Aware, SpywareBlaster, and Spybot-S&D, may have been purchased by antivirus software companies.
The larger your organization, the greater the risk you’re undertaking by making a large investment in what is still a pure, mostly unmanaged, client-side solution. No matter how you solve the spyware problem, you’ll be solving it again in a couple of years because the product market will mature and spyware blockers will catch up with antivirus products in terms of management capability.
I’m not advising you to sit on the sidelines, however. Spyware is a serious problem in many environments. It’s a problem that you may need to solve even though the tools for dealing with it are still relatively immature.

Using spyware btockers

Until anti-spyware programs mature and include more enterprise features, you may be flying blind in terms of knowing how your spyware-blocking programs are performing on users’ systems. Not all programs that block spyware in real time have event logs. Must you rely on faith alone to know whether your spyware blockers programs are doing anything? Until event logging is commonplace, you may have no choice. You may need to rely upon month-to-month helpdesk statistics to see if spyware-related calls decrease over time.
Keep in mind that spyware blockers is relatively new, and to some degree, imperfect. For an example of this, find a spyware-infected machine somewhere (any machine that’s been operating without a blocker for a while should do) and run a spyware-blocking tool of your choice, eliminating everything that it complains about. Now, repeat the process on the just-cleaned machine with a different blocker. There’s an excellent chance that the second program will still find something. Just because you’re running a spyware blocker doesn’t mean that your users are spyware-free. It really means that they’re mostly spyware-free.