Announcements

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...

As all the world is talking or even going crazy about Black Friday we decided to do a Black Friday offer too. If you need to save some money, feel free to use our Black Friday discount. You may of course see your purchase as a contribution to our project and buy your license at... continue reading The post Black Friday 2019 appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...

Friday marked a day for a global climate strike, and the begin of the Week for Climate. We – the anti-malware industry – provide a technology that consumes a lot of electrical energy. Dedicated computers running 24/7 process millions of malware files each day on our side. Computers running anti-malware scans use up a lot... continue reading The post “Forensics for Future” appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...

The latest version of SpyBot Anti-Beacon (version 3.4) has just been released. This new version improves and increases the level of protection of your privacy well beyond what was offered in previous versions. Our development team have analyzed even more of the data being sent from your PC to the Internet and identified additional third... continue reading The post A new version of Anti-Beacon (Version 3.4) has just been released appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...

Don’t wait until the banks implement 2FA authentication for your credit card. Take action now… Banks in Europe are planning on introducing 2FA as a way of improving security. If any of your accounts have already been compromised, despite this, you could be still be exposed. Spybot Identity Monitor allows you to check if any... continue reading The post Use Spybot Identity Monitor to check if any your accounts or email address have been compromised appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...

Does anybody remember E.T.? Yes, that was a long time ago, and the cute alien really wanted to “phone home”. That might have been entertaining in 1982 – but today it is a bit different… Nowadays, some software companies seem to be obsessed with “feedback”. Error reports? Send them off to Mummy. Process operations? Quickly... continue reading The post Does anybody remember E.T.? appeared first on Spybot Anti-Malware and Antivirus. More...