Spybot regularly turns up Stat Counter as a problem after a check of my hard drive, with dropdown details adding: "Tracking cookies (Internet Explorer: [me]cookie:[me]statcounter.com"
Since someone on this forum a few months ago wondered when Microsoft Security Update was going to stop coming up as a problem [as ut dies every time with me too] when it shouldn't be, I wondered if Stat Counter too is something I should also ignore.
spybotsandra
2006-10-25, 17:50
Hello,
StatCounter is a tracking cookie and not that harmful. It is quite common for popular websites to employ such tracking cookies from third parties. They use them in order to track the users' surfing habits on their websites. As I said, these cookies are from third parties but they are employed by the site.
Hello,
Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.4 has been detecting Security Risks associated with Microsoft Security Center Registry changes. This is neither a false positive nor a bug. It is just an information.
Spybot-S&D only wants to bring to your attention that "someone" disabled one or more notifications in the Windows Security Center, e.g. the notifications that your virus protection is not active or not up-to-date. If you changed the settings yourself you can safely tell Spybot-S&D to exclude those detections from further scans.
In order to do so please right-click each in turn, then click "exclude this detection from future scans". That way, should any other part of security center settings change, Spybot-S&D will still detect those.
The same is true if you have another security solution installed (like McAfee Security Center or Norton Internet Security). These programs do also disable the Windows Security Center in order to take care of things themselves.
The reason why the changes are flagged by Spybot-S&D is that there are also malware programs that disable the notifications so the user doesn't take note of his security tools not being effective.
Some more information is also available in our forum:
http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=87
Best regards
Sandra
Team Spybot