Is XoftSpy a rogue software?

I was wating time at the dinner at my in-laws' house in Virginia, last day, in part so I could get a head start on the traffic heading up to Austin for the ISPCON keynote I inspected this evening. After I sat down at my father-in-law's PCto check my favorite websites, a program called XoftSpy SE interrupted what I was doing to tell me it had detected a new spyware threat on the machine.

My father-in-law said that a few days earlier he'd received a pop-up alert that a whole bunch of nasty spyware programs were lurking on his computer, and that XoftSpy SE was just the trick to clean up his machine.

Now, I had never heard of this company or its products until yesterday, so I immediately began manually searching for the file the program identified as spyware. But after searching for a while, I could not find the targeted file anywhere on the PC. Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I began to get the feeling that my father-in-law might have fallen for an aggressive marketing pitch for an anti-spyware application he may not have needed in the first place. I say "may not have needed" because I checked the logs of his automated, weekly Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search & Destroy scans, which turned up nothing of interest over the past two months.

Now, my father-in-law is a pretty sharp guy, but he often needs a little guidance in the computer security department, and as such I suspect he's not alone among other adult baby-boomers trying to work their way through the computer age. So allow me to highlight a few excellent resources for finding and using trusted anti-spyware software.

First of all, some of the best anti-spyware tools out there today are free. We review at least four of them in the video tutorials on computer security that we published recently.

If you or someone you know is intent on purchasing anti-spyware programs, I would highly recommend paying a visit to this comprehensive guide to spyware programs at SW. This site is an excellent catalog of anti-spyware vendors, noting which ones are using questionable marketing tactics. SW also has a separate page that lists known, trustworthy anti-spyware programs.

My point is not to bash companies like free XoftSpy download, but to help our readers make informed choices about a very serious and necessary layer of computer security protection for any Windows-based PC connected to the Internet.

For what it's worth, here's what SW had to say about XoftSpy:

"Over the past few months, XoftSpy has taken aggressive steps to reign in its affiliates (who were primarily responsible for the unsavory advertising), revised its license text, and released a new version of XoftSpy download (version SE) that addresses our concerns with false positives. Given these changes we can no longer regard XoftSpy SE as 'rogue/suspect' anti-spyware."