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Like most folks these days I presume, you typically scan your computer either daily or weekly using a Anti-Virus program.  You also probably run cleanmgr.exe routinely to clean up your drives from junk and temp files.  You probably use some kind of firewall on the PC.  You probably also then use some kind of spyware product also.

I’ve become very disappointed with most spyware/adware products these days.  They are simply either ineffective or too paranoid.  Neither is an effective solution.  The industry leading Webroot is probably the most balanced on the market today, but it’s updating is making it ineffective when a outbreak occurs.  I for one will not buy a product that doesn’t effectively update its database constantly.  This is a big job and why I think it’s worth the money to spend on a solution, ONLY if it stays up to date. 

For a free solution you can always turn to SpyBot and Ad-aware SE.  Both these tools can be had for no cost stay ”reasonably” up to date, if not as current as some of the non-free products.  However every day one see’s a new product coming out claiming to be the latest and greatest. 

In order to get the most effective detection capabilities I think one needs to run the anti-spyware using a central repository that is constantly updated and does not require ”downloading” to update, or does so with the latest (built hourly) rules.

I have tried out Trend Micro Anti-Spyware Online Scan and will provide you with a step by step usage.

Using Trend Micro Online Scan

This is a very easy process.  The first thing you’ll obviously need is a PC connected to the Internet and to be running Internet Explorer v6.01 or greater to use the ActiveX component.

I tried it with Firefox using the ”IE Tab” extension, which worked fine, and also with the ”Open in IE” extension, which also worked fine.  Obviously the latter actually spawns IE, where the former simply opens a window within the firefox chrome.  If you don’t understand all this, don’t worry.  It works.

So, next you go to the link I provided above and allow the web site to install the ActiveX component which downloads the executable to perform the update and scan.

Once you get the executable running it will then update it’s rules from the repository at trend micro and start scanning.

Now we wait until it’s done.  The final result is noted by this screenshot we took:

From here we would have taken a very serious glance at the machine itself, if it wasn”t for the simple facts.

1.  This PC has Avast AV running, Scanned before detected nothing.
2.  This PC also has Tiny PF 2005 installed, and could not verify any infection directly or indirectly.
3.  We don’t know what it exactly found that was the problem.
So we take a closer look at the details that Trend Micro found, and this was the screenshot:


Taking a closer look would again give us indication that our box is owned.  But a few of these items are not a total surprise as far as the findings, the others are just lacking any real detail.
So we click on the ”Threat Details” link at the bottom for a select item such as this keyfinder.  Unfortunately the ”Detail” is rather pathetic.

 


 

As you can see for yourself this doesn’t tell us anything, and doesn’t confirm what we’ve found.  So I decide to submit these ”positives” to virus.com for testing against the worlds top AV programs.

First though, lets just double check it against our machines Avast AV:

Nothing. Well lets just make 100% sure.

 

 

As I was able to verify NONE OF THE ”POSITIVES DETECTED BY TREND MICRO ANTI-SPYWARE were legit.  Most of them in fact would have been cleaned and then rendered numerous software packages unusable.  The ONLY agreement with Trend Micro was noted in this screenshot below.  No other files were tested positive.

This is not an acceptable tool for any ”type” of detection and certainly not acceptable as a cleaner. 

I would not consider this tool to be ”beta” quality.  You are better off running NOTHING than this software.