Announcements

Here at Spybot, we’ve always loved a little mystery. That’s why we’ve tucked away a digital Easter egg somewhere inside Spybot Anti-Beacon—a small surprise that’s waiting to be found by clever users. And this one’s not just for fun—it might be especially relevant to what’s going on in the world today. We won’t spoil the surprise, but here’s a gentle nudge to get you started: That’s all we’ll say for now. If you’re curious and enjoy poking around software with a curious eye, this one’s for you. The first person to find and report it to us (with proof!) will receive a free two-year Spybot Anti-Beacon license—our way of saying thanks for having fun with us. Whether you’re a longtime fan or just downloaded Anti-Beacon for the first...

There’s an old joke that the internet is basically made up of two things: adult content and cat pictures. While that might get a laugh, it also points to a very real trend in the history of online security—one that hackers have been exploiting for decades. In the early days of the web, adult content was a surprisingly powerful tool for spreading malware. One common trick involved “dialers”—small programs that would secretly connect your computer to expensive phone numbers, racking up hefty charges while claiming to give you access to exclusive adult material. These scams thrived on curiosity, embarrassment, and the limited tech know-how of the average user at the time. Fast forward to today, and while the internet is awash with free...

Signal, the renowned encrypted messaging app, has recently been at the center of cybersecurity discussions due to the exploitation of its linked devices feature by malicious actors. Understanding this vulnerability and knowing how to manage linked devices can significantly enhance your communication security The Exploit: Malicious QR Codes In February 2025, reports surfaced about Russian-affiliated hackers targeting Signal users through the app’s linked devices functionality. This feature allows users to connect multiple devices to their Signal account for seamless messaging across platforms. However, attackers have been distributing deceptive QR codes that, when scanned, inadvertently link an unauthorized device to the victim’s...

We’re happy to share that with our next releases, both Spybot – Search & Destroy and BrowsAlyzer will officially support the Zen Browser, a Firefox-based alternative that’s gaining traction among users looking for more control over their online experience. At Spybot, we believe your browser should be your choice—and that your privacy and safety shouldn’t be compromised no matter which one you use. That’s why we’ve always worked to support a wide variety of browsers, from the most popular to the more privacy-conscious and independent. With Zen Browser joining our list of supported browsers, we’re taking that commitment a step further. Why Zen Browser? Zen Browser is built on the same open-source foundation as Firefox, but it comes...

It happened to one of the most respected figures in cybersecurity—Troy Hunt, founder of the popular data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, recently shared that he was caught off guard by a phishing email. While traveling and feeling the effects of jet lag, Troy received what looked like a legitimate email from Mailchimp, the platform he uses to send his blog updates. The email claimed there was a spam complaint against his account and prompted him to log in to resolve the issue. The email looked convincing. And in a moment of lowered alertness, he entered his login credentials and a one-time password on a fake website. Just like that, the attackers had access to his Mailchimp account and exported the email addresses of...

Welcome to our weekly look back. The biggest issue this week surely was the hiccup at Verifone, who mixed up purchase confirmation templates. Thankfully, no customer data was leaked, but we spent a lot of time researching due to lack of timely support from their side. On the bug fixing side, we’ve fixed support for the latest Opera browsers, which is not yet in the updates, but led to an updated BrowsAlyzer, which will be released as BrowsAlyzer 5.1 next week. The Firefox Privacy Policy changes from last month led us to play around with Firefox alternatives and discussing some inspirations gathered during that. Some of our regular development systems this week have started to move to Windows Arm64, strengthening our existing support...

Sick of Firefox’ latest Privacy Policy changes? Use a privacy focused clone! In late February, Mozilla changed the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy of the Firefox browser. While not as widely spread as some years ago, it still has a significant user base, for example among people trying to de-google. While they changed wording just two days later, it’s still worth to see what other browsers based on the Firefox engine are out there that might be an alternative. By the way, we’re supporting 15 different Mozilla forks in our tools (including Spybot and BrowsAlyzer), but here are three recommended ones: LibreWolf LibreWolf is strongly privacy oriented. It does not even look for updates itself, unless you install an add-on for that or...

If you’ve bought Spybot from our shop in the past week, you might have noticed an email from 2Checkout sending you instructions to activate your Dirac product. We’ve worked with Dirac to make sure no data is leaked to them, and Verifone has now also confirmed that they simply mixed up email templates, but did not leak customer data. Verifone confirmed that the issue has been fixed. Your data is safe and has not been forwarded to Dirac, as confirmed by both Dirac and Verifone. The emails were sent directly by Verifone, our shop provider, not by Dirac. The post Verifone (2Checkout) mixes up vendors confirmation mail – no data leaked! appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. Facebook - Instagram - LinkedIn - Reddit - Threads...

We’ve just pushed an update to our new Anti-Beacon release from last week, fixing two bugs that were reported on our support forum. Anti-Beacon 5.1.1 This support forum has received a new search filter called Issue Tracker, accessible from its Spybot menu, where you can get a quick overview of known and fixed issues. Issue Tracker We’ve finally uploaded Spybot Track Shredder, announced last week, formerly known as Spybot Secure Shredder, and created a page on our website for it. Spybot Track Shredder website We’ve continued work on Spybot Browser Protection, adding a self-test that shows that your current tracking blockers most likely will not cover the type of protection that we’ve got to offer. For this, we’ve ported more of the...

So we’ve released Spybot Identity Monitor 5.1 and Spybot Anti-Beacon 5.1 as planed, and Spybot Secure Shredder 5.1 is about to come as well, but that was easy, since everything was prepared last week. We also started using the WhatsApp channel we set up last year and will integrate it into our announcements workflow. Download Anti-Beacon 5.1 Buy Anti-Beacon Download Spybot Identity Monitor 5.1 But most importantly, we did some work leading to a new Spybot Search & Destroy release – this week, we re-invented the web filter that is part of the Spybot 2 series in the form of a new browser plugin. Thanks to Firefox and Chrome both supporting the Web Extensions API, we were able to create something that supports both browsers (and a wide...

The latest iteration of Anti-Beacon 5.1, delivers even more Immunizers than ever before! Download Along with a new visualized version of the Live Monitor introduced in 4.1. Now you can see what Anti-Beacon blocks in real time, giving a better overview of the Telemetry being blocked, and what is not currently blocked by Anti-Beacon. We have also made a number of interface improvements along with some fixes to commonly reported bugs, such as the “Microsoft Edge Creators Telemetry” not being blocked. The Volunteer Program page has been updated and fixed and explains how you can receive a LifeTime License for Anti-Beacon, and contains links to various sections of our new forum on the type of info we are looking for. Security is a team...

If you see the term 2CO.com|Spybot – Searc or similar on your bank or credit card statement, you’ve probably bought a Spybot product from us. Some customers have checked back with us if this is a legit purchase, because part of the subject (“2CO.com”) might be confusing. Kudos to those users – always be sensible and aware of anything that looks a bit off! We’re going to publish this quick information here to allow others to quickly find the same information when this question arises again. Here, 2Checkout, or short 2co.com, is the official vendor we use. In the past, we’ve been selling more directly, but honestly – managing sales for dozens of countries, and more annoying, making tax declarations for as many – is tedious if you could...

Our first release this week is version 5.1 of Spybot Identity Monitor. It brings mostly bug fixes and tiny improvements to further smooth the experience of using it. For any questions, please head over to our refreshed support forum. The post Spybot Identity Monitor 5.1 released appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. Source

This week has been spent with preparations to getting back to more regular release cycles. We’ve got so many new ideas that we sometimes tend to add more and more, but never finishing new tested releases, so we’ve now planned to release new product versions each quarter with whatever features are ready by then. And we already worked by our new plans: by Monday, you’ll have new releases of Spybot Anti-Beacon, Spybot Identity Monitor and Spybot Secure Shredder. For the coming two weeks, we plan for BrowsAlyzer, FileAlyzer and RegAlyzer to be released, and then finally on to our core product. We also spent some time fine tuning our updated support forum. It’s still silent there, since the absolute majority of support takes place over...

If you've been to our forum this week, you might have noticed that it's running a new software. And you might ask yourself if forums are still a thing these days, with so many social networks around. At least we asked that question quite a few times. Here are our results, and how we came to ask this question in the first place. Our forum is dedicated to privacy and security, and people come to us asking for help on these topics. While there are many social media networks that could be used to interact with Team Spybot, our forums have the advantage of not sharing your issues with anyone connected to you, and with your data being saved with stricter rules than those social networks have (we do not share, except what any visitor can see...

It's time for another update to Spybot Anti-Beacon. Anti-Beacon 3.9 brings the usual small bugfixes (e.g. updates to OpenSSL 3.0), some preparations for localized versions to come, and a massive list of new tracking stuff it protects against. New are a lot of immunizers for Firefox, but there's also more Windows tracking and some bits for gamers. A complete list can be found at the below. Look for the update within Anti-Beacon or download from the website. Speaking about Firefox, we found a privacy focused variant of it called LibreWolf and added support to BrowsAlyzer 3.0.5 and the upcoming Spybot 2.9.85.5 release. Windows Telemetry Razer Game Scanner Microsoft Visual Studio Feedback Microsoft Visual Studio Telemetry...

The 1st of February is called Change Your Password Day. We at Team Spybot usually do not celebrate this day, because a forced changing of passwords regularly usually leads to weaker passwords. This year we want to change the recommendation a bit: Check your passwords and change them so that you do not have the same password for any two services! Background: A technique called credential stuffing. Credential stuffing means that criminals take lists of credentials that have been compromised on some sites and see if they work on other sites. A few things can help: Keep separate passwords for each service, do not use your personal details such as your date of birth, do not use words that can be found in dictionaries. Use a...

Read to the end for a chance to get a free licence! This week a customer informed us that a competing product was flagging entries created by Spybot as PUPS (Possibly UnPopular Software). To find out if Spybot was misbehaving or if the other tool had a false positive, you would have to look at the registry values that were flagged. This can be done with regedit.exe, which comes with Windows, and your favourite search engine. But it's also a good example of two features of our own registry editor called RegAlyzer - value interpretation and value documentation. RegAlyzer comes with a database of registry entry documentation created by us (plus it reads the Group Policy files of other software on your system to provide the...

Welcome to the new format of our news. In "Wrapping Up The Week", we'll give you a weekly insight into what we're doing. Here's our first part: In order to be a member of the Microsoft Virus Initiative, we have to prove that our software is able to detect a very high percentage of the latest malware files. Working on these tests mean to scan thousands of malware files. For our current test run, we've been using the command-line scanner built into the latest installer to see how it works for this purpose. And we found so many things that could be improved that we decided to update it. Here's a short list of the most useful and visible changes: Live removal during the scan, automated or prompted Structured colour output showing...

A certain security solution was recently uncovered to be harvesting and selling user data by the press recently. Many other major security software companies are tracking and spying as well. Is your antivirus software among them? Take a look at the new Antivirus category in Spybot Anti-Beacon 3.5! The post New Anti-Beacon 3.5 stops harvesting done by security software appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...