Hello, friends.
I live in South America. I have been using NIS for about four years or so. For about one year, I have noticed an increase in the detection of tracking cookies, every time I spend more than half an hour online, and run the scan as I finish. Sometimes I notice sluggish behavior from other programs on the computer, and this is a sign that some virus or tracking-cookie has found its way in; in which case I just run an NIS scan, and sure enough, cookies are found and my problem with the sluggish behavior is solved.
However, about three months ago, I was in the U.S. on vacation for a few weeks, and I took my laptop with me. While I was there, I finally decided to upgrade my Internet browser--after two years of using a very old version (I think it was from Firefox 4 to Firefox 32 or something). I may possibly have also reset my NIS to remove tracking cookies automatically also at that time--rather than to have it "ask me first,"--but I am not completely sure about that one (at least, this is how it reads as the present settings anyway). I may have also installed a few "extensions" and "add-ons" for Firefox--perhaps even related to malware. Beyond that, I don't think that there was any other major change done on my computer since three months ago.
After a few weeks of sporadically running the usual "quick scan" or "full system scan" I noticed that NIS was no longer detecting the usual batch of tracking cookies, after using the Internet, but at most, one per month! In fact, the one that it detected (two months ago) did not even show up in the final screen, to my recollection. These days, everytime I go online, I still run the scan once or twice, and I never get any detection.
I began to think that perhaps NIS was detecting without reporting, so I looked over what I perceived to be the detection history. All I saw were those detections from three months ago, the one from two months ago, and lots of moments where I simply attempted to change the settings in NIS or temporarily disable NIS, and NIS recorded it as a successfully-blocked attempted intrusion.
Could it be that Firefox itself (or one of the add-ons) was doing such a fabulous job of detecting 99% of what only NIS alone was able to detect formerly? I find that hard to believe, if not even naïve. I thought it more likely that something had happened to NIS simply by upgrading Firefox. Sometimes I think that I still encounter more of the "sluggish behavior" that I mentioned earlier, but this time, when I run the NIS scan it does not present any cookies or other detections, as a possible explanation. (Still, I may possibly be mistaken, as sometimes I encounter that behavior when running several programs simultaneously, or downloading while running other programs, or running a scan at the same time as other programs.
I briefly tried uninstalling Firefox 32, and re-installed the older version of Firefox. After a few hours I ran an NIS scan, but it came up empty. I re-installed version 32.
I have been tempted to try another AV program, but hesistate to go through all the hoops of uninstalling and then perhaps re-installing with yet another time-consuming NIS web-installation. I decided to ask for help from all of you first.
After searching online briefly, I discovered that other people have had the same problem as I, but immediately after upgrading Chrome and other browsers other than Firefox, so I could not say that Firefox alone was doing something wrong. There does seem to be some relation to upgrading browsers in general.
Do any of you have more conclusive experiences with this situation?