Spybot 2.0: Patrick Kolla, our chief software engineer, has started a series of small blog posts on features of Spybot-S&D 2.0, starting with a blog post about modularization, with more entries on various other topics already waiting in queue.

Recommendations: our page with recommendations about security software has been out of date for a while, so we decided to go ahead and rewrite it. You can view the new article here and comment on our blog here.

SpybotWiki: our wiki, which has been restricted to logins of forum users until the OpenSBI system was finished, is now open to all readers, forum account or not. Stay tuned for the final release of OpenSBI!

FileAlyzer 2: a first beta release of our file analysis tool created to help you understanding various file formats, and designed to support OpenSBI, is now available as the first of our tools to reach version 2.0. It's new multi-file interface allows you to easily compare multiple files, all detail pages have been updated to make use of XP/Vista style controls when available, and its speed has been improved to show up without delays now.

Download portal: now if you are wondering where to download FileAlyzer 2, or other betas, previews and smaller downloads, we have a new download portal available that replaces many download links on the website and in scattered forum posts. The FileAlyzer download page there is a good example for the useful details we added to most downloads - screenshots, supported Operating Systems, and hashes to verify your download.

With regret, we have to announce that update support for dated versions of Spybot-S&D is going to end.

Fighting malware is a task that constantly requires new approaches. Some of these, we will make available through updated versions of tool libraries or plugins, but some make updates of the full software necessary. For those interested in a detailed technical background, see the OpenSBI wiki, which shows some of the changes in structure.

Users with very old hardware, and users of Windows 95 who could not use Spybot-S&D 1.4, chose to stay with very old versions of the software, and we tried to accommodate them by still offering them the updates, with the limitation that Spybot-S&D would complain about a lot of incompatible detection patterns and results would have to be used with extra care.

While we regarded that as a service for the aforementioned group of users, using current detection patterns in old software versions is getting too dangerous if that extra care is not applied, which we simply cannot expect from every user. We therefore decided to restrict updates to the current software version, and during version switches, as has recently happened with the switch to 1.6, the last version for a short while.

If you have any serious reasons for not upating to 1.6, let us know on the forum!