Rookie of the Year

The winner of this year's Rookie of the Year award is Sunbelt Software's CounterSpy Enterprise, software that can detect and delete spyware. Spam used to top administrators' annoyance list, but now spyware is quickly surpassing it. Unethical companies are constantly creating new spyware for financial gain, and cybercriminals change their malicious code regularly to try to escape discovery. Both unethical companies and cybercriminals are waging a battle for your surfing and buying habits. Internet advertisers want to know where you click, and others are trying to steal your identity and credit card information. It's likely that your personal users’ computers have been infected with several spyware products and can't get rid of these by itself. Symptoms that your computer has been infected with spyware vary from slower Internet connection speeds, unwanted pop-up ads when you're not even on the Internet, changes in your Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) home page, or the slowing of your PC to a crawl. Given the number of readers that voted for this product, its CounterSpy to the rescue!

CounterSpy Enterprise provides a centrally managed antispyware solution with real-time protection that detects and removes adware, spyware, and other malware from corporate networks. The central management console lets you access and control agent deployment, threat database updates, quarantined spyware, configuration, agent policies, scan scheduling, and recommended actions to spyware threats. The solution features an intuitive policy-based user interface with multiple methods to deploy transparently. The Active Protection Monitors provides real-time protection to workstations to reduce the chance of spyware infestation by responding to system changes such as home page hijacks, Active X installations, and browser helper objects (BHOs). To protect your end users and networks from spyware, CounterSpy Enterprise benefits from multiple sources for its spyware definition updates, including Sunbelt Software’s own CounterSpy Reasearch Team, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of Sunbelt’s ThreatNet community.

One user who has definitely been saved by CounterSpy Enterprise is Clint Pate. Clint is an instructor at Texas State Technical College (TSTC) in Waco, Texas, where he estimates he deals daily with 500 users. Clint became familiar with Sunbelt Software about 7 years ago. He's always felt that Sunbelt Software is ahead of the curve on products that facilitate ease-of-installation and configuration. Security is one of Clint's top concerns, especially given the rise of ID theft and malware. Clint says, "I'm so disgusted with these malicious idiots that just want to destroy other people's hard work. I've spent a lot of time cleaning up hacker intrusions. I looked around to find a solution to my problems and read many articles. I approached Sunbelt Software with an offer to teach their product, CounterSpy Enterprise, in my Final Projects class in return for server and client licensing for our department. The state had cut back on our budget, and we really needed a lot of time to test the product and compare results with other products. We are astonished and totally satisfied with the results! We'll be presenting our findings to our department and then up the chain of command to the president of TSTC in order to appropriate funds for the purchase of CounterSpy Enterprise for TSTC-wide implementation. I assure you that CounterSpy Enterprise is the best product in its class. The reporting features are astounding, and the scanning is super quick on the client and isn't extremely resource-intensive. The scanner detects virtually anything I throw at it. CounterSpy cleans almost anything and, most importantly, it keeps track of spyware instances so that you can see from where and when the threats are coming. CounterSpy Enterprise backs up its claims in full!"