Spybot - Search & Destroy, abbreviated as Spybot S&D is a popular proprietary malware removal program which works onWindows 95 and later. Like most malware scanners, Spybot S&D scans the computer's hard disk and/or RAM for malicious software. Spybot-S&D was written by the German software engineer Patrick Michael Kolla, and is distributed by Kolla's Irish company Safer Networking Limited. Development began in 2000 when Kolla, still a student, wrote a small program to deal with the Aureate/Radiate and Conducent TimeSink programs, two of the earliest examples of adware.