Webroot Spy Sweeper

» see webroot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Spy Sweeper scanned a Windows machine for the things antivirus of the period refused to call viruses: toolbars nobody had installed, and software that logged what you typed and sent it somewhere. Legally most of it had a license agreement behind it, which is exactly why the antivirus vendors were slow to touch it, and that gap in the market is the whole reason a separate anti-spyware industry existed at all for about six years.

Webroot was founded on 5 July 1997 by Steven Thomas and Kristen Talley, in Boulder, Colorado, and its first product was Window Washer, a small utility for wiping browser traces off a machine. Spy Sweeper came in 2002 and changed the size of the company. An enterprise edition followed in 2004, an antivirus engine got bolted on in 2006, and sales rose to roughly twenty times where they had started. In 2005 the two founders sold most of their stock to a group of California investors in a deal worth $108 million.

I did not buy this and I do not think I knew anybody who did. Security software with an annual subscription card inside a cardboard box was an American retail habit, and where I was the same layer of protection arrived as free downloads passed around on forums. That distance is small next to the real one, which is that the category itself evaporated. There is no consumer anti-spyware market now. There is antivirus, which swallowed it, and underneath that there is the operating system, which swallowed antivirus.

~ the case file ~

~ the panic it sold into ~

Between 2003 and 2006 spyware was a mainstream news story in the United States. Congress held hearings on it. The FTC brought cases. Home machines were genuinely unusable, running four toolbars above a browser window that had shrunk to a letterbox, and every fix somebody tried left the machine slightly worse. Into that Webroot sold a product that did one job properly and told you what it had found in language a non-technical person could follow.

Microsoft bought GIANT Company Software in December 2004 and had a free beta out in January 2005. It was renamed Windows Defender later that year and shipped inside Vista from the start. Webroot's public line at the time was that it was not worried, which was the only line available to them, and it was wrong in the way that being right about your own product does not help. Spy Sweeper stayed better than Defender for years. It stopped mattering that it was better, because the competing product was already on the machine and cost nothing.

~ what got buried with it ~

The end is recorded in a single support document rather than an announcement. Webroot's legacy product page gives Spy Sweeper an end of sale of 3 October 2011 and an end of support of 31 December 2012, with the migration path listed as Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus. SecureAnywhere launched on 4 October 2011, one day after the old line stopped being sold, and it was not a new version of anything. It was a rewrite around a tiny local agent that asked a server what it was looking at, which is the model everything uses now and which made the enormous local signature database that Spy Sweeper had been built around look like a museum piece.

Steven Thomas never saw any of it. He had left the company after the 2005 sale and died in 2008 after a fall in Hawaii, at an age where founders are normally still on their second company. Webroot itself outlived its most famous product by a long way. Carbonite bought it on 26 March 2019 for $618.5 million, OpenText bought Carbonite that December, and the end of life notice for Spy Sweeper now sits on an OpenText community forum, two owners removed from the people who wrote it.

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