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It has been said that nine out of ten computers have suffered from an infection of spyware. While you might think that an estimated infection rate of 90% might be rather excessive, are you prepared to take the risk that your system might be one of those to avoid this insidious threat. You should be aware that even those who only rarely venture onto the Internet can become quickly infected. I don’t want to sound too much like a scare-monger but let me relate a recent incidence.

Not so long ago I tested a new laptop for the presence of spyware. The laptop had been used for just three short surfing sessions. The scan of the system revealed 90 occurances of possible spyware threats with varying levels of danger. Image how that could relate to your own surfing activity.

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The product that carried out the scan, and incidentally gave prominance to the nine out of ten infection rate, was Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 8.0. This title provides a range of security tools to sit alongside its spyware solution. All the tools can be access from a front-end menu and you have the option to run a pop-up blocker and spyware shield as part of your normal system start-up. While the spyware shield will help provide a degree of real-time protection from any future intrusions, you should also run the main spyware module at regular intervals.

You can configure the settings that Acronis will use when searching for spyware. The software can be set to check just those known locations used by spyware or the whole of your system while looking for a common or user-defined categories that can include adware, browser hijackers, key loggers, diallers, sniffers and trojan horses. The results of a scan will be displayed in a hierarchical tree structure. Information will be shown as to each item’s category, location, danger level plus a general description. Individual items or whole categories can be selected for removal.

As with anti-virus software, you do need to keep your spyware definition files up to date. Acronis realises the value of this and have taken suitable action. Included as standard with this suite is a one-year free subscription to its spyware update service via the Internet.

The Acronis Pop-up Blocker can be customised by clicking on its system tray icon. As part of its blocking duties, this module lets you create White and Black lists to indicate specific URLs that you are willing or unwilling to accept pop-ups. Viewable logs of pages visited, which can be used to help populate White and Black lists, and blocked URLs are created.

Privacy is another aspect tackled by this pogram. You can clean up history lists created by applications, Internet activity and general Windows usage. In each case you can define the various settings that will be applied and select specific components before instigating a scan and securely delete any unwanted data using various methods that range in intensity from a single overwrite to upto 35 data destruction cycles. The final section of this suite contains some addition tools. There is a file shredder; drive cleaner; bootable media builder; and paging file cleaner.

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 8.0 with run on Windows 98 or later with 64MB of RAM. The product has been priced at £19.99 and is well worth considering.

http://www.phoenixglobalsoftware.co.uk/acronis/privacyexpert8/index.asp