WARNING: JUNK AHEAD

Darien Grahagraham-ssmithi puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and software stuffed with junk

Junk offender: Spyhunter

I often use this page to bemoan software that comes bundled with unwanted junk. This time I’m going to call out a program that is, in my view, itself a piece of junk.

It’s an antivirus tool called Spyhunter. Not having previously tried it, I thought I’d give it a whirl, and almost immediately ran headlong into a potential red flag. A disclaimer on the download page warns you that the Malwarebytes virus scanner categorises Spyhunter as a “potentially unwanted program” (PUP) and blocks it. This is odd, because Malwarebytes doesn’t block other antivirus tools.

Indeed, based on what happened next, I’d say ‘ potentially unwanted’ is a gross understatement. Initally, all seemed fine. The Spyhunter installer didn’t attempt to smuggle any contraband junk on to my PC.

What the software did do was ferret through my system and come up with a long list of 261 possible threats lurking on my hard drive (see screenshot). Funny that. Windows Defender hadn’t given me any warnings at all. And here’s the catch: the free version of Spyhunter won’t remove them. Click through and you’re told you’ll have to part with £26 to free your PC of these cursed threats.

Of course, no one says antivirus software has to be free. But here’s a funny thing: once I started drilling down into the details, I realised that a great many of the detected objects were just web addresses in a text file. Others were harmless registry keys and logs left over from programs I’d deleted long ago. I was beginning to realise why Windows Defender hadn’t sounded any alarms.

To be on the safe side, I downloaded Kaspersky Free and ran another scan – and this time my computer received a clean bill of health, with not a single genuine threat uncovered. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Spyhunter over-eggs the threat level just to get your hard-earned cash. That makes it as unwanted (no potentially about it) as the junk I usually write about.