Sunday, November 13, 2011

Stop spyware and tracking cookies with SpywareBlaster


Spywareblaster is a free program to stop spyware from being installed in yourcomputer, instead of allowing tracking artifacts to sneak in and having to scan your hard disk to remove them, Spywareblaster stops tracking software from installing in the first place, protecting the computer against adware, browser hijacks (anchoring your homepage), malicious ActiveX scripts, tracking cookies andflash content. You can enable and disable displaying of flash content through the easy to use Spywareblaster interface, another section allows you create your own custom list of blocked ActiveX controls and another section stores a backup of theHosts file, a file used by your operating system to resolve IP addresses to an  URL,commonly tampered with by malware to redirect you to other pages, theHostsfilcan be rolled back to a certain time and date if that ever happens.



This software consumes very few computer resources and can be used in conjunction with a firewall, antivirus and other antispyware tools without any compatibility problems, it should save you time in the long term by not having to continuously scan the hard disk for adaware. Unfortunately browser support is somewhat limited to those using Internet Explorer rendering engine (Maxthon, Avant, IE, etc) and Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Chrome users have been left out, if you do most of your Internet browsing with something other than Internet Explorer or Firefox, protection will be very limited.
The necessary database updates to keep up with the latest Internet threats are only automatic in the paid for version of this program, the free version has to be updated manually which is easy to forget, I wasn’t too impressed with Spywareblaster, is not bad but I do not see this as a must have, my main grudge is the lack of support for browsers other than IE and Firefox.