I have a hell of an annoying problem where my homepage continually gets changed to some weird search engine or another. I'm assuming that it is spyware that is the cause, so what I want to ask is, do any of you guys know a reliable spyware removal program that I can download and run for free?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. :D

adaware --> www.adaware.com...actually im not sure if thats the right site :unsure: try searching

best.program.ever

it will find and crush and destroy.

Do a search in download.com for Spybot. Just as necessary as Adaware if you ask me.

Spybot + adaware = best way to go :)

I heard this guy that said adaware cant find anything, anymore and the best is this other one(whch costs money) but i think its bullshit, adaware is great for me...

Yep. Using these two in conjunction will get rid of those pesky bots and spys.

I agree. Spybot and Adaware are both necessary nowadays, especially for broadband users.

yup, the adaware website is www.lavasoft.de by the way :mrgreen:
suprisingly, adaware was the only thing that could find the 3 copies of sasser on my pc (well actually the family pc, mine has a firewall :mrgreen:) :?, there's also some other program (apart from spybot, which hasn't been updated in ages) which is really good, i'll try and think of it later..:mrgreen:

I don't know whether this is because I have a Mac, or have just never experienced it before, but may someone explain to me what this spyware stuff actually does? :blink:

It's basically files sent as temporary files which can allow the company's who make them track where you go on the net, etc. They're most common in P2P programs like Kazaa.

As mentioned before, Ad-aware and Spybot are the two most popular choices.

Also another method is to browse your Registry and look for anything related to spyware.

Does anybody have news on spybot's updates (not the program itself, but the spyware definitions), it hasn't been updated in almost 3 months now...

Oooooh, now there's a fun way to spend your weekend! [/sarcasm]

Never heard of this SpyBot thing, but I use Ad Aware and I have cable and have no troubles. I run it once every month or so and it only ever finds 3 or so objects - harmless tracking cookies everytime.

So...should I assume they don't affect me Mac? I've never experienced Spyware before...

nah, i don't think anyone would even bother making harmful spyware for a mac, although you may have one or 2 tracking cookies, unlikely but possible nonetheless, although they're harmless anyway. unless you go on warez sites/pr0n sites/have a p2p program installed (not including bit torrent) it's highly unlikely that even on a pc you've got spyware...:D

I heard they're working on an update and it should be released sometime this month. But no one seems to be totally sure.

I use Ad-aware and Spybot.

Yeah I use both Adaware and [/i]Spybot[/i] together. Coupled with NAV I never have any problems... **Knock on Wood**

Thanks for the tips guys, I know have both Spybot and Ad-Aware running and things seem a little smoother.

:thumbsup:

Spybot is now at version 1.3 :D

DOWNLOAD HERE

thanks oc :D, spybot 1.2 was starting to become a little useless on my system....:P

Thanks oVerCaffeinated. :D

actually, you might all want to rethink using spybot 1.3, before downloading it i read all the user reviews on cnet and around 70% of them were negative...

Can i ask why you read cnet user reviews? Many of them are uninformed, babbling pieces of garbage.

And most negative ones are also written by the competition of the software developer in question or the positive ones written by the developer themselves.

I use Spykiller 2003. It's not free but i think it's better than most other programs out there.
I had the same problem where my homepage kept changing by itself. It drove me mad so I reformated and got WinXP instead.
I absolutely hate Spy/Adware! :evil:

That was exactly what I was going to say and the site for it (well this is what Google told me) is here (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/) it has a link on there to somewhere on download.com to download it, it says it's 1.7 mb on the ad-aware site, it says it's 1.61 mb on download.com and when I downloaded it it was 2.05 mb so go figure but trust me it's really good for getting rid of spyware.

EDIT: I've been running it for about 20 seconds so far and it's found 28 "New Objects" in other words things with spy/adware (this is on my brother's computer though) :blink: