The Security Mentor

Giant Antispyware from The Giant Company competes with the free programs Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware in the spyware detection and removal market. Giant's software costs $29.95 with a year of updates and has a 15-day free trial that requires you to give them your email address.

This isn't a review. I haven't put in enough time for a review and haven't bounced my observations off Giant to get their comments.

It installed painlessly and scanned my machine quickly. It reported six problems that Spybot and AdAware had been silent about. I investigated the problem it described as "severe" and discovered it was a false alarm. I had run a test once to see an Internet Explorer security hole. Giant Antispyware saw that the security hole had gotten used and jumped to the conclusion that I must have a piece of spyware that's known to install itself through that security hole. I didn't have any of the files which belong to that piece of spyware.

Next I investigated the problem it called "moderate". That was another false alarm. A normal person might run into this one. It detected the ZoneAlarm firewall program as spyware! If you want the gory details, ZoneAlarm's email scanning feature tells Windows that it's going to use files that end with ".ZML", and there's a piece of adware that does the same thing.

The other four detections were all tracking cookies. It missed some other tracking cookies that AdAware and Spybot found.

Their online support forum doesn't seem to mention the false alarm with ZoneAlarm.

So what's my point already?

First, this is a reputable program from an honest company. Lots of "antispyware" is not.

It is impressively thorough when in scans the innards of Windows for problems but seems to jump to conclusions.

I believe the false alarms are harmless. Near as I can tell, I could have told it to remove the things it thought it had found and everything would have continued to work.