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Thread: The end of Spybot.

  1. #1
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    Default The end of Spybot.

    Dear friends and developers of Spybot, I have always been fond of your utility and as a PC Reclamation and Networking Technician, and you will be missed. I would like to say that up until your sudden shift in business strategy, I toted your name and encouraged donations from every personal client I met, and even some people when I worked for IBM and DELL as a Field Service Technician as I preformed virus removals and registry restructuring.

    It seems that your spirit of free marketing and non-profit antivirus solutions for the masses, has died. A short burst of cash from your current stature, will eventually lead to your inevitable downfall and destruction. Any technician worth his salt understands that there are a plethora of other free anti-virus solutions, even if its doing things the old-fashioned way.. A companies network and security structure, even down to a small business is not made up of executives willing to spend money. They will find one or several computer technicians to find a solution for them, and they (we) will pursue the most affordable option even if its not the "best", especially in this economy.

    Your companies removal of its primary antivirus function in the free edition will lose you favor in the eyes of technicians, not because you don't have a wonderful product that has a history of efficiency and a long standing record of success (which I can vouch for), but because there are so many OTHER free (working) solutions, that your product falls short of when finances come into play. I started my personal business as a street technician, and preformed a full hardware diagnostic and virus removal for $20 to put food on my plate. Now, I'm not alone. The costs of removals and repairs in commercial are comparable to buying a BRAND NEW PC. The field of professional technicians who are capable of password removals, data recovery, solder rework and yes, even virus removal has all but dried up in this desert of an economy. My point is this: If I offered a virus removal for $40 (a little under what most local tech shops offer, which is 60-80 due to their labor and building slot costs) and I have to pay $50 for ONE copy of Spybot with antivirus, not only am I losing money? I am wasting time. My time. My clients time. And that is not a real figure. The reality is, A company, tech shop, refurbishing warehouse or home user will find the free solutions instead of purchasing ANY product, and that is the bottom-line.

    Farewell old friend, and enjoy the coinage while it lasts. As of today I am permanently removing you from my toolkit.

  2. #2
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    Default The financial solution.

    Naturally as a technician, I cant complain about a problem without offering a solution.

    I support Spybot and its community wholeheartedly, and I want nothing more than to see your continued success? and return to glory.

    Lets talk money. Right now as I mentioned in my previous post, The cost of effective antivirus solution for your largest clientele (technicians) disappeared with the removal of your AV and AM solutions. Evaporated. You want to go big, we get it. You want to be successful, we know. We are sympathetic to the economic situations of both the staff of Spybot and our own clientele. But you need to consider how the AV industry has operated over the last decade, and use some solid business sense. you cant just label your product with a couple prices and throw a couple discounts at it expecting everyone and their uncle to pay for it.

    Lets look at Business models. Specifically, Norton, Symantec and McAfee (for now). Successful? Yes. Useful? No. (duh.). But they obtained success through marketing to vendors and sheer advertisement after the earth fell from under their feet. They have a crappy product nobody wants, and chances are that the full education of the people at large will eventually spell their doom, no matter how many commercials, ad's, or pre installs they have on store-bought machines. Everyone sees the end coming for them. Even them.

    Now lets look at the leading products on the market, your new competitors AVG, SAS, and Webroot. Avg has let the ball drop, but they have been largely successful in controlling the market in the past before they decided to omit certain features of their program from the free market (which is why they are dying now.). SAS Hot stuff right now, they are currently the favorite of new technicians for end user environments, and home users. They are the ones that are eating your market value like Cookie Monster in the land of Kebler Elves, as of your 2.0 revision. Now well look at our corporate powerhouse and long standing giant in business class environments, Webroot. They own the corporate market, in the same way symantec did. Completely. They have full adaptability not only windows, but mac, and certain linux distributions as well, and can be found on virtually any device to date, including smartphones and tablets, with a powerful and long standing history of success due to their product (comparable to the effectiveness of your anti-malware software in windows environments).

    Every one of these businesses started from the bottom as a free product. Most of the more successful ones? Still offer free solutions to home users. AVG is known to have fallen short VS. Rootkits. symantec and norton have horrible, virtually non-existant antivirus protection and even slow computers down to the point that they actually emulate the effects of a virus! They are all still in business. Webroot has recently and suddenly died in the end user environment virtually overnight, because they decided to sell their product to specific vendors, and charge a fee to general users who don't use the proprietary systems that offer it for free. They did this knowing that they would gain a slight boost in short term profit from the vendors they sold to for free service because they already HAVE the corporate environment under lock and key for a long term solution and a fallback. And they will probably have it for a long time.

    Spybot is a program that has no history of supporting large networks or corporate environments that I have ever heard of, and your largest clientele are more experienced technicians and personal computer owners. Almost entirely. Now the reason that the other more shoddy AV like Norton and McAfee are alive today? Are because their free. You can try to shut out the market and attempt to take territory from Webroot, but in all honesty? You have no compatability with other operating systems, network support on an OSPF on MPLS, or any kind of multi device environment like most major businesses have today. You probably will not succeed, because Webroot already supports windows 8 fully on corporate class networks, and your still struggling to have it run effectively on 8. They have entire teams of paid developers and open source contributors from all over the world, and you just don't have the resources to match that at this time. Maybe ever. What you DO have, is SMALL business and PRIVATE business support, and (for now) the support of technicians in many reclamation warehouses (like the one I worked in) or shops.

    So touching back to the previous post, offering improved solutions and complete web protection and etc on a paid model is a GREAT idea. But if you take away the full function of your AV and AM away from your free addition? your just going to be replaced by something like SAS. The bottom line is that you cant afford to sacrifice the end-user market, because in the end you don't have anything to fall back on. Small and private businesses are DYING in this economy. There bean eaten by companies like Apple, IBM, Dell, Sun, Dish, etc.. And with the tax breaks on outsourcing to other countries, no small business will ever be able to beat or match their models, because they sell products then less then it costs to produce in the states. Your left with SaS, which is slightly (and ONLY slightly) inferior to your product, and they offer their AV for FREE. If you cant match that? You are going to pass by the wayside.

    Popularity. For lack of a better word, the owning of assets. Whoever controls the market, controls the profit. If people stop using you? you die. Word of mouth is your strongest asset; In fact webroot was free until they had the resources to develop into a more flexible and corporate environment. AVG was free, and it was good until they omitted certain features of their AV in the free edition, and plummeted to its death. If you want the opportunity to own the market? Offer your full antivirus, antimalware and immunization for free, and use the additional products you have developed in a more expensive version. you can even offer a ghosting version to companies for a price, web protection etc. But if you don't want to be dropped like an old hat, you need to be made to understand that free AV is the only thing that kept you alive all this time, and sacrificing it will be destroying your largest asset. Cause SaS is already in with the new kids and you Barely offer a better AV. If old techs come back to you and your pay only? Your entire product value will disappear overnight and you will just be another dead AV who's updates ended in 2014.

  3. #3
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    Default 2.0 Vs. 1.6.2 Controlled Virus Bomb Results

    Licensed Windows 7 OS x64
    1 Black hat Bomb (custom) 400 Viruses + 1 SW rootkit / Hook entry 1 HW rootkit / Reinstaller

    Ran 2.0 First in Administrator:

    72 Tracker 0 Trojans 0 Adware 0 PUPS 0 Malware 0 Hijackers 0 Browser 0 Rootkit? Entries.

    72 Issues Fixed Immediately

    Ran 1.6.2 in Administrator:

    72 Tracker 3 Trojans 210 Adware 69 PUPS 5 Malware 22 Hijackers 1 Browser 0 Rootkit? Entries.

    338 Problems Fixed Immediately
    44 Problems Fixed After Restart


    This is indicative that 2.0+ no longer supports antivirus or malware protection and only supports spyware removal. It is logicical to assume that definition updates for 1.6.2 have ceased, due to the missed 18 viruses. This is a controlled test from a live and current V bomb. Sources are certain members of the white hat community and certain black hat cooperatives that provided the bomb on the condition that the full project details and log file were reported back to them. (they were also provided to the white hat community as anon ^^)

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    Default The Real Reviews, 1-2 Stars

    The History of ratings since around 2004 on file forum. Notice the sudden drop of ratings (1-2 Stars) since 2.0 was introduced as a pay-only platform for its AV and AM function.
    http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail...y/1043809773/1

    Softpedia 1 review, 1 Star.
    http://www.softpedia.com/progViewOpi...e-178289,.html

    PC Mag review 1.5 stars, all time low for Spybot, backed by customer reviews(v2.0)
    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412372,00.asp

    I hope I have spent enough time writing these articles to convince you to change your business strategy. I want you to understand that I am committed to this project, and there are a lot of people out there besides me that want to see your team and assets succeed. Bring back the spybot we knew and loved, and forget this pipe dream of a perfect world where everyone buys good products, cause in reality? Your Pro version is probably just going to get cracked, modded and then put up for download on the pirate bay. THAT is reality. You need the support of the population if you want to make any profit, and we are ready to help use you and share you among our clientele if you are willing to maintain your status as primarily freeware.

    If anyone else would like to share their thoughts or opinions, please feel free to comment. Keep it constructive, positive and proactive please!
    Last edited by tashi; 2013-05-22 at 04:47. Reason: Merged 3 topics from 2 forums

  5. #5
    Member of Team Spybot PepiMK's Avatar
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    Thanks for the feedback!

    I'm afraid you're jumping to some wrong conclusions here But I appreciate the honesty, and the effort to write this down in detail.

    The spirit: First, spirit didn't put food on your plate. You described your personal business, and I don't see you offering free work at all there (understandable!). And we still offer something that's free. We don't restrict the core, neither immunization, nor antispyware/antimalware, nor cleaning. Why we need to ask for money for the AV part, you can see further down this post.

    Your expenses: Let's get to your technician's calculation... if you do just one repair a year, you're probably loosing money, that's right. If you do about one per week, which still is a side job only, that's come to around 1 $ per repair. But if you really do just one repair per year, we're actually thinking about a per-case-solution. We even had one in the past, but technicians found it too annoying to track instances they used the software.


    "Big": We do not want "to get big". We want to survive. What's out there when it comes to antispyware solutions? Everything is bundles of AS+AV, and the (most) AV players are sharks. As soon as someone installs one of the major AVs, it'll tell them Spybot is incompatible and he has to remove Spybot. People pay for their AV, and get Spybot for free. The AV forces them to decide for one of them. How do you think people decide? We've got tons of emails from the uninstall reason email offer telling us the sad truth. That is why we would die, if we would. Regardless of the popularity.

    Sure, none of them are able to describe the purposed incompatibilities, but we don't have the millions needed to go to court against McAfee & co. properly.


    Free AV: Now we could go ahead and offer our own AV. Hire a few dozen people, let them write AV signatures for a year, and then start with a bad detection rate. Where should we take the money to invest into that? We like to stay free of investment capital, since that money would have influence over us, and we need to be independent to decide what is malware and what is not based on our criteria, not on money.

    AV quality: As for the quality of our AV, we went ahead, digested long-term comparisons of AVs, and licensed the best technology we found out there. That way, we don't have to take our current working power away from analyzing malware. The "downside" is that licensing technology isn't free, so if we made our AV free, we would probably be out of money the second day after release

    Your statistics: did you update after installation? 2.0 brings the same definitions that 1.6 brought (plus new ones of course)! Sounds quite like your 2.0 is not up to date at all (if you don't open the Update module, the Start Center should also show the current update state - better in 2.1 than in 2.0). And I invite you to get a 30 day demo of 2.1 and see how many more it gets when it has AV Will even check if we've got the promo license thing in place and could get you a promo license to test against these.

    PCMag: 2.1 came out fast since we took that one seriously. Our internal tracking system had a few dozen of tickets about things mentioned there. Many about usability, and A about the detection rate. Well, AV was started before that, but that's another reality: whoever compares AS solutions usually compares using AV+AS samples, meaning that combining products have an advantage.

    2.0 vs. 2.1: you mentioned in 2.0 AV+AM was pay-only. That's not true 2.0 had no AV at all. And 2.0 has, as I wrote above, the same database (plus more) than 1.6.

    Community: are you aware of OpenSBI? Years ago, we started an effort to improve quality without going over our budget by offering a community platform for detection patterns. Well documented (I hope), with supporting tools. If that would've went well, we might even be fully open source by now. We still offer support for the OpenSBI format even if this means the engine has to support a second one (our newer one is not as beginner friendly - if you can use that term at all when it comes to malware signatures). Not sure if that answers one of your questions, just wanted to mention it since it shows our spirit.

    Go ahead, test your bomb against 2.1+AV, and if some are still missing, feel free to submit OpenSBI signatures so that we can add them (any user will benefit from that, OpenSBI rules are free updates for the free version like all AS+AM updates). Or communicate with us and help us writing signatures that will also be available to all users. And if it isn't possible with 2.1, help us make an even better 2.2. Evaluating user input is a tough job (since not all feedback is easy to understand), but we take feedback seriously.
    Last edited by PepiMK; 2013-05-22 at 10:17.
    Just remember, love is life, and hate is living death.
    Treat your life for what it's worth, and live for every breath
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    Well I appreciate the clarification, and I would be more then happy to provide feedback on 2.1 with the promo license sent, as well as the list of viruses used during the control test for the team.

    From what I understand about the pricing and availability of the product that includes AV support, Its one copy per machine. So provided that each machine the av model was applied to was paid in full, the relevance of having one or hundreds of system repairs is limited because for each machine you would either need to break even or over if you owned a shop (for labor and rent per hour). That's not to say that it wouldn't be considered by average users, but I do freely recommend open-source and free market solutions when asked about products. But if what you said is true about the 2.1 version not having libs for detection without updates, then not finding all that malware makes a little more sense. I would like to point out that most professionals (including myself) absolutely cannot and refuse to connect a potentially infected computer to any network, so in a real-world scenario it might be wise to include the most current detection packet alongside the download to ensure that offline usage is as effective as possible.

    Now Spybot and SAS provide system immunizations, and both are available for free. Spybot has always been considered an addition to AV, and I understand that the general proactive functions still apply to the free version (at least when there is nothing to clean, according to the earlier control test). Therefore both will be loaded along side Microsoft Security Essentials and tested for integrity. Because you responded promptly and fully to my feedback, I am willing to preform more extensive control tests with the tools at my disposal, this time in both administrator and safe-mode on overall completeness. I will ask them to replace the masking method with a hypervisor in tandem with their DKOM rootkit as a control method, so that testing can be done for integrity VS the immunization features on the Windows 7 Platform for both AV's after the VM windows is reinfected. Note that it will take more time to recompile a new bomb specifically for testing, but given the results from before I should be able to expect the cooperation of my constituents and more accurate results. Thanks again for your teams support in providing me with a promo, I will measure both the free and AV versions of Spybot against it as well (so 3 AV control tests under 2 modes in x64 Win7).

    If at all possible, I will also research OpenSBI and talk with the hats and see if they would be willing to submit the undetected signatures, they might already have newer methods of intrusion. Analysis by the W hat community on the test results might pull up detection methods for them as well which would allow for the submission of that information, but understand I want to remain neutral between both parties and want the ire of neither, so if they say "no" I will have to honor our arrangement which was originally "Keeping undetected viruses classified and reported back to the appropriate IRC feeds". I am going back to school to specialize in IPsec with the aim of becoming a pen-tester, so although I want to commit as much as I can? Just understand that these people are very valuable to me and my future and I don't want to burn bridges over a couple viruses that will have definitions up for them in a couple months, vs. having information and assets that could provide insight for several years.

    As far as AM function, I will be doubly sure to have the absolute latest updates for 2.1 for both free and promo across the control test. Now, as far as what has already been detected and what hasn't in SaS vs 1.6 Spybot, I will go ahead and post the logs. (note that these are only the detected articles) The selection of viruses were meant to emulate what might be found on a heavily infected system, rather then a directly attacked machine, so bear that in mind. These tests were run with Spybot 1.6 and then sequentially followed up by SaS. OS is Win 7 Pro x64 SP1 Build 6.01.7601

    Spybot Detections:

    Various Tracking Cookies
    Adviva (revision unknown)
    Babylon Toolbar (revision unknown)
    bProtector (revision unknown)
    Burst Media (revision unknown)
    CasaleMedia (revision unknown)
    Claro. Toolbar (revision unknown)
    Clickbank (revision unknown)
    DoubleClick (revision unknown)
    Delta. Toolbar (Revision Unknown)
    FastClick (revision unknown)
    Facebook.messenger (revision unknown)
    Fake.Adobe.Zuzy (revision unknown)
    Fraud.DefenceCenter (revision unknown)
    FreeCause.ShoppingBHO (revision unknown)
    iCrossRider (revision unknown)
    ilivid.Toolbar (revision unknown)
    IncrediBar (revision unknown)
    MediaPlex (revision unknown)
    PCPerformer (revision unknown)
    Right Media (revision unknown)
    Smitfraud-C.generic (revision unknown)
    Wajam (revision unknown)
    Win32.2UrFace.bho (revision unknown)
    Zedo (revision unknown)

    Additional SaS Detections AFTER spybot
    PUP.bProtector (additional entries)
    HKU\S-1-5-21-382895067-4004251821-471502826-1000\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main#bProtector Start Page [xxxxx]
    HKU\S-1-5-21-382895067-4004251821-471502826-1000\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes#bProtectorDefaultScope [ {0ECDF796-C2DC-4D79-A620-CCE0C0A66CC9} ]
    and *.* entries: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{15D2D75C-9CB2-4efd-BAD7-B9B4CB4BC693}
    More Tracking Cookies
    Pretty much every cookie targeted at google chrome. (305 Goggle chrome tracking cookies missed)
    +24 SYSWOW64 entries targeted at flash player under \2TKXAM7U
    Pup.Wajam (google chome again)
    ShopAtHomeSelect
    3 entries under {E8DAAA30-6CAA-4B58-9603-8E54238219E2} (x86!)
    TROJANS *NOT* DETECTED by Spybot! via Google Chrome
    .Agent/Gen-InstallMate
    .Agent/Gen-FraudPack
    .Agent/Gen-Fakealert
    C:\PROGRAMDATA\NNGOLNCGNPYQI.EXE
    .Unclassified/Dropper
    C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ARFC\WRTC.EXE
    C:\Windows\Prefetch\WRTC.EXE-32F48380.pf

    Hope this provides some insight, hopefully I can record the log file rather then writing it out for the next tests, but I really don't know how id get the file over to my main pc.. I really don't trust that bomb.

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    Also, I noticed that the OpenSBI project isn't really advertised a whole lot. If I were you, I would highlight that aspect of your service and label it as an open source development system. I am certain that there would be at least a couple of people who would be willing to contribute to writing free AV profiles for you, especially considering that your product has a history in the past as being one of the more if not the MOST active and formidable antimalware/spyware solutions at the beginning of the millennium.

  8. #8
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    Of course you have to honor your agreements, that's absolutely clear

    Thanks for the reminder about offline updates! We actually have the manual updater on our website, but that's AS+AM only. We're now looking into providing a AS+AM+AV manual updater as well, in fact, I'm working on that right now. And a notification the system scan should show that signatures are still missing of course!

    You're probably right about OpenSBI not advertised a lot. The wiki has a lot of documentation, but it's not that visible... will think about another way to push it (we had various attempts already ).
    Just remember, love is life, and hate is living death.
    Treat your life for what it's worth, and live for every breath
    (Black Sabbath: A National Acrobat)

  9. #9
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    By the way, the combined full signatures are around 200 MB. Quite a lot, something we wouldn't want to put into the main installer simply because the update mechanism also allows to spread the load better

    I'm looking into ways to make manual incremental updates possible as well now.
    Just remember, love is life, and hate is living death.
    Treat your life for what it's worth, and live for every breath
    (Black Sabbath: A National Acrobat)

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    Thumbs up Excellent and truthful, I hate to say it, but I couldn't have said it better myself !

    Steve you got it going on, I couldn't have said it better myself. I fully agree with everything you have stated. I truly hope they listen as I have been a fan of Spybot for years and hate to see it go.

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