* Testing to find which anti-spyware product is best for your corporate network
McAfee, Tech Assist top anti-spyware test
By Barry Nance
Spyware can kill your business quicker than spam or viruses. Spam eats bandwidth and productivity (as you spend time deleting in-basket items). Viruses delete files, throw egotistical messages on your screen and use your address book as a springboard for perpetuating themselves across the network.
But spyware insidiously logs your keystrokes, rifles through your files for password and credit card data, peppers your screen with ads and slows your PCs to a crawl.
To find which anti-spyware product is best for your corporate network, we invited about 30 vendors to submit products to our lab for testing. We received 18 products from 16 vendors, and we also looked at the beta version of Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware tool.
Identifying and removing spyware (either at the desktop or preventing at the gateway) was our most important criteria. We also looked for useful reports, timely alerts and easy deployment and usability. Protecting our network from users who roam the Internet too freely, or who bring unapproved software into the office, was our main goal.
We gave separate awards for the gateway and the client/server approaches. McAfee’s Secure Web Gateway wins a Clear Choice award for keeping spyware from entering our network (see Net Results for anti-spyware gateway products). The Secure Web Gateway thwarted 90% of the spyware in our tests, has an intuitive user interface and was child’s play to install. On the client or server, Tech Assist’s Omniquad AntiSpy Enterprise wins Clear Choice award. (see Net Results ) These products had high spyware detection success rates, easy-to-navigate user interfaces and useful reports.
For more on this test, please go to: http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2005/091205-spyware-test.html?rl
