the end of anti-adware/spyware software

it seems like only yesterday that microsoft stepped into the anti-adware/spyware business and now it's probably going to collapse...

why? well, the thing about adware and spyware in the past was, despite being a pain in the ass to remove they were relatively easy to detect... stand-alone programs or dlls that are discrete and easily removed, that use various registry or other startup tricks to make sure the the adware/spyware runs also gives away their location...

unfortunately, just as our cyber-innocence was lost 20 some odd years ago by the advent of computer viruses, some of it's final vestiges that managed to stick around are again under siege by file infecting adware...

you're probably wondering why i would take such an alarmist stance on this, since i rarely do so... the reason is simple - existing anti-adware/spyware technologies simply can't cope with file infection, it is in no way comparable to what those products were doing before, the only thing that can deal with file infection right now is anti-virus technology... so we're back in the position of needing the anti-virus industry to provide all-in-one 'solutions' again and the anti-whatever-else industries will be left in the dust because AV technology is neither cheap nor easy to develop and the AV industry has an incredible headstart...

this is actually really sad for the people involved... we had all these new types of threats and whole new industries spring up to try and deal with them, and then someone goes and adds file infection to them and it all falls down... the only 2 ways this won't happen is if file infection doesn't catch on as a big trend in adware/spyware, or if the anti-virus industry sits on their hands and (intentionally or otherwise) gives the anti-adware/spyware guys a chance to catch up...

of course, you could (quite correctly) argue that they should have seen file infecting adware/spyware coming and developed their products with that in mind, but that doesn't make things any less sad for the employees (who generally don't have a huge say in the architecture of the product) of those companies...

[edited to fix totally borked link - thanks for pointing that out nick]