With the rising of rootkits and professional malware, cleaning those away got more and more important and should earn a more prominent position next to scanning.

The cleaning concept in Spybot-S&D 1.x is already doing a lot, like for example trying more than a dozen methods to get rid of files. It's a bit one-dimensional though, and one of its worst disadvantages is the need to do sometimes do a complete rescan on boot to cleanup some files. Cleaning in Spybot 2.0 will therefore...

We all know that teatimer comes from Spybot Search and Destroy, and that it helps protect your computer. However, some of us may not understand how it protects us, or how we should react to a prompt from teatimer.

Generally, the rule of thumb for teatimer is the following:

If you are online and surfing the Internet, and you see a unexpected prompt from teatimer, do the following:

1.) Think about what you were doing, were you installing any software?...

I've read it mentioned as a request for 2.0, and it's been a controversial thing for a long time, so I thought this earns its own 2.0 blog entry.

The standard AV (antivirus) approach at scanning is filesystem based, iterating through all or selected file partitions or folders. Extend that to AS (antispyware), and you'll add a full registry iteration as well. Each file/registry entry will be compared to a set of detection rules.

Our "current" (1.x) approach is...