LAVASOFT AD-AWARE Pro 8.0.3 Anniversary Edition
AD-AWARE Pro has some extra protection but lacks in the very basic protection that even a typical antivirus program could offer
Lavasoft’s antispyware application, Ad-Aware Pro has nothing special that goes with its release as an anniversary edition, which costs $40 to buy. The test conducted on Ad-Aware Pro resulted in nothing that could be looked forward to. It failed miserably in detecting several adware, spyware and other malicious files. As, this was not enough Ad-Aware Pro also has an interface that is very complex to be operated by an average user.
The German Organization, AV-Test.org that conducts security-product testing, scanned Ad-Aware Pro and found it to be good at only detecting 83.6 percent of the 111,833 spyware, Trojan horses and several other samples of malware. Moreover, it was also found that Ad-Aware Pro is somewhat partial towards detecting some specific malware more efficiently than some others like, 96 percent of the remote-control “backdoor” malware is successfully detected by it, while the percentage of detection could only reach to 78.3 in case of adware and spyware.
Although Ad-Aware Pro includes antivirus scans, yet it was far behind than many other antivirus programs on the terms of performance and the inclusion of antispyware coverage have become a common feature in all antivirus programs. The test conducted recently by AV-Test .org used such a set of samples for the security suites which was not very much comparable, yet the best suites showed outstanding performance with blocking almost 99 percent of the samples of malware.
Ad-Aware Pro also failed to perform any better in our usage test. On the installation of Ad-Aware Pro, it started giving warning of suspicious files and eventually began the scanning. But the suspicious files were only in need of an encryption program and were completely safe. Now we performed the recommended action by allowing the access instead of ignoring or quarantining the same. This resulted in a never ending display of warning by Ad-Aware Pro and the repeated scanning after each warning.
One thing that we made out of all of these performances of Ad-Aware Pro is that despite its complex technical terms and references (e.g. ADS & MRUs), which are the essential elements of the application, it is straightforward on the terms of its use. There are several sections of the interface that notifies the user about the program status or let the user schedule the execution of scanning. It also provides the feature to control some very sensitive real time tasks like, preventing an attempt of accessing a well-known malicious website or watching over the suspicious processes.
Ad-Aware Pro blocked a malicious website named Zango, which is notorious for distributing a harmful adware download, with the help of its malicious site-blocking feature. But it fails to provide the real time protection against scanning a malicious file already saved on the system, which is in contrast to other antivirus programs. It is better to prevent the downloading of Trojan horse or any other malware to the system instead of clearing it after it has already infected the system.
It is in the programming of Ad-Aware Pro to check the open files for any malware and this feature is most likely incorporated in order to run the Ad-Aware Pro without creating any problem along with a regular antivirus program. It is not worthwhile at all to run another security program after the checking done by Ad-Aware Pro, but it becomes necessary in the face of non-detection of several malware by Ad-Aware Pro. Besides, the antivirus programs are able to successfully eliminate cookies, spyware and adware. So, it doesn’t seem a good deal to spend $40 for Ad-Aware Pro.