adware

Cameron Diaz fans, look out. The actress has made McAfee's list as the most dangerous celebrity to search for in cyberspace.

Released Thursday, McAfee's fourth annual Most Dangerous Celebrities report tracked the top performers, models, and other celebrities that cybercriminals use to trick people into hitting malicious Web sites. Search for a hot photo or the latest gossip on your favorite star, and you could find your PC infected with a payload of malware instead.

In grabbing this "award," Diaz bumped last year's riskiest celebrity, Jessica Biel, to the No. 3 spot.

Being No. 1 … Read more

Hello, I'm Peggy Yu, senior manager of business development at Download.com. Just like promotions posted in this space by Catherine Hwang, I'm here today to help bring Download.com users the best software deals available. Today we have a particularly good deal for popular maintenance suite Glary Utilities Pro. For the next 24 hours, we have an exclusive offer of 50 percent off Glary Utilities Pro.

Why would you want Glary Utilities Pro? Glary Utilities Pro offers a simple, but nicely designed tabbed interface for performing system cleanup and maintenance. Its basic scan includes a Registry cleaner, … Read more

One of the first applications built to find and remove malware and spyware, Ad-Aware's reputation is well-justified. The latest version continues the publisher's tradition of adroitly addressing user concerns, but flaws remain.

Building on the improvements made in version 8, former Ad-Aware users should be glad to hear that the program installs faster than before. This version of Ad-Aware offers two new features to users of the free version that had previously been restricted to the paid upgrades: antivirus protection, and a long-awaited scheduler. The AV protection comes courtesy Sunbelt, makers of Vipre. Ad-Aware 8.3 loads faster … Read more

You may want to think twice if you hit a site with a .cm extension. That belongs to Cameroon, pegged by McAfee as the world's riskiest domain.

McAfee's third annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report, released Wednesday, looks at riskiest and safest domains across the globe. The small nation on the west coast of Africa reached the top spot this year with 36.7 percent of its sites posing a security risk. Because .cm is often a typo for .com, McAfee said, cybercrooks like to use that domain to set up typo-squatted sites to hit you … Read more

Correction: Although this review was written for Spyware Doctor version 8, a typo misstated the version number as version 7. That has since been corrected.

Spyware Doctor 8 offers users a superb collection of malware prevention and removal tools, but its infamously strict trial restrictions makes it difficult to evaluate. With quick scanning and multiple tools for stopping malware before it infects your computer, the paid version is a solid spyware remover.

Installing the program annoyingly requires you to reboot the computer, but as soon as Windows finishes loading, the program will start scanning for malware. Impressively, the scan took … Read more

One of the first applications built to find and remove malware and spyware, Ad-Aware's reputation is well-justified. The latest version continues the publisher's tradition of adroitly addressing user concerns, but isn't yet perfect.

Building on the improvements made in version 8, former Ad-Aware users should be glad to hear that the program installs faster than it used to. Without a doubt, though, this version of Ad-Aware improves greatly on what has come before. It loads faster during your boot cycle, and scans are faster. Empirical tests noted that while the Quick Scan finished in less than 10 … Read more

If you're looking for a robust feature set from your security suite, and you're looking for an affordable price, you could do worse than Trend Micro's 2010 Internet Security and Internet Security Pro. However, this basic version offers the bare minimum of protection, even with decent performance benchmarks. This is problematic because the feature set is Trend Micro strength, but to get it you've got to pay for the Pro version.

Trend Micro claims that boot times are 20 percent faster, that the programs use 40 percent less RAM, that the download itself is 25 percent … Read more

Kaspersky Anti-Virus does a better-than-average job of keeping your PC safe, but it lacks the robust feature set of its more-expensive sibling. Several new features have made it into this version along with expected upgrades to the anti-virus engine, but one of the best--the Safe Run program sandbox--is sorely missed.

New features in the 2010 edition include a behavioral-based detection system called the Urgent Detection Sytsem. The UDS uses the anonymous data Kaspersky customers who choose to participate in submitting their system scans for analysis. In fact, the UDS must be opted-out of--there's a check box and data collection … Read more

Protecting your computer from viruses is not something to take lightly, so we're glad to say Kaspersky Internet Security does a better-than-average job of keeping your PC safe. Three new features along with expected upgrades to their antivirus engine keep Kaspersky competitive.

New features in the 2010 edition include a behavioral-based detection system called the Urgent Detection Sytsem. The UDS uses tthe anonymous data Kaspersky customers who choose to participate in submitting their system scans for analysis. In fact, the UDS must be opted-out of--there's a check box and data collection statement to read when you install the … Read more