XoftSpy Review

XoftSpy

Submitted by alex2pb on Sun, 2007-04-29 14:05.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 27.97$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Ease of use
Cons:
Not so stable, poor detection techniques, missing help-file (it has an online knowledge base though), false positives.
Review:

ParetoLogic's XoftSpy is an easy to use anti-spyware application, however it was considered as a rogue product at the beginning.

The product behaves poorly, for example after a scan ends, the main window maximizes by itself, without touching it. Although it has a tabbed-style interface, the scan button is oddly placed in the top, instead of showing the scanning page.

As far as I have seen, it lacks modern detection techniques like archive scanning, heuristic detection and process module scanning. This will minimize the detection rate and it will fail to disinfect malware samples that use DLL injection techniques (many of them actually use this method in order to bypass firewalls and to avoid being spotted by the users or by anti-virus and anti-malware software).

The scheduling is achieved through Windows(R) Scheduler instead of a home-brewed solution. The scanning is quick but not through, so in terms of efficacity, this program performs poorly and skips important areas of the operating system. The product is being advertised as being the best, but it actually is the opposite.

Conclusion:

I wouldn't recommend this as an anti-spyware solution. Instead, get Microsoft Antispyware or Spybot SD.