important spybot warning

[paul9]

i just reinstalled my os, and whacked spybot s&d back on the system. i had been at a friends, yesterday, messing with spybot, and looked through the exclusions list. there were about 4 excluded items, which shouldn't have been excluded. i assumed that certain spyware had added itself to the exclude list, which was a frightening thought. however, i checked my own, fresh, install of spybot and found the same four items excluded. it seems that these items may be excluded by default, when you install and update. please be vigilant and check your install.
on a spyware related note, i tried the latest version of system mechanic 4 from www.iolo.com , and it now has a spyware removal feature. it reported finding two items on my system which spybot, adaware, and cwshredder never reported. don't know if it was accurate, but it does have other handy windows maintenance tools, popup stopper, defragger, and more. well worth a 30 day trial.

[ArcticFox]

You are right, that is odd. I guess I'll have to re-check my system. Thanks.

[lost-and-found]

hmmm..very odd. Same seems to be the case on my system, especially with the New.net having been checked to be ignored...

[paul9]

a couple of new.net things and a couple others which i can't remember now, what were yours?

[lost-and-found]

http://forum.gladiator-antivirus.com...howtopic=14756

Here's the response of the author's I believe:

"New.Net is nothing related to Sasser... at least not the one detected by Spybot. It's the 'browser addon' from www.new.net.
We've been discussing their methods and policies for quite some time, asked for some changes they considered, and New.Net is slowly loosing the spyware
status.

It's similar with MySearch, just that we haven't finished our review on them
yet."

[Jeordiewhite]

Yeah, I noticed that it had those four spyware exclusions, i now install it and deselect those. I dont think it's right to have those stay on, i knew a few people whom all have had mysearch i think was one of them installed, so i came over and unchecked them and got rid of the toolbar.
However I am not too worried spybot did this by maybe getting payed off or something. When there are other spyware programs that are much worse, however most people should know better than to try them. They add spyware and will go ahead and uninstall or ask to uninstall other spyware programs like ad aware or spybot, probably because they might remove such a program that requires you to pay or you get infected with spyware from that program. If spybot does such a thing and still gives you the option to stop that, i am not disapointed, just supprised to see it happen, but i'd much rather take spybots option and disable it myself if i come across the four items that are left alone, it's not like it installs the spyware for that.

[lost-and-found]

Google is your friend...there is a whole lot of discussion about this topic, as I have just learned in the last five minutes. The official explanation is the one I have quoted above.

Check the links out for yourselves: http://www.google.com/search?q=new.n...ored+in+spybot

[paul9]

thanks for doing the research, lost-and-found. i'll take your word on that, too tired to check out the link. however, i'll still keep them unchecked in the exclusions list. i prefer the old net to new.net, and mysearch is www.google.com.

[John Prophet]

Why are things like "ahead Nero" "adobe reader 6" etc listed as things to ignore...are they somehow considered spyware?

[paul9]

usage tracks only, jp. mru files and folders etc. if you don't remove these items, then it can be handy, next time you use these programs.