ive just this week installed avast! and after the first scan i noticed that there weren’t any cookies detected. SUPERAntiSpyware detects them so i was wondering why avast! ignored them.
As far as I know, avast doesn’t do anything with cookies. SAS (SUPERAntiSpyware) is a good one for that. I use it myself.
Cookies are not malware(viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, adware…). Cookies are harmless text files used to store user information (e.g. forums use cookies to remember your user name) but they may be used to track the pages you visited. Only the page which wrote the cookie can read it.
Example: you visit page A which contains an ad . The ad saves a cookie. Then, when you visit page B which contains an ad from the same advertisement company, the ad from B reads the cookie and knows that you visited page A. The second ad is able to read the cookie because both ads actually belong to the advertisement company’s website, not to the pages A and B. Also because of that the ads cannot get you user name, etc. through the cookies.
Other tools for cookies will be junk files cleaners… like CCleaner, nCleaner, Glary Utilities, ATF-Cleaner, etc.
If you use Firefox, there are a lot of extensions to keep your privacy and cookie-free.