One thumb up for MS Security Essentials in early tests Independent testing lab AV-Test.org has published one of the first reviews of Microsoft Security Essentials, Redmond's freebie anti-virus package. The software earned favourable comparison with other free packages, such as AVG and Avast. Detection rates were respectable and the product scored plaudits in avoiding false …
That review has put my mind at ease regarding replacing Avira with MSE. I was getting sick of the invasive and cheesy pop-ups! For anyone with privacy concerns related to the involuntary sign-up to MS Spynet when installing MSE, follow the instructions here to deactivate it:
http://www.malwarehelp.org/how-to-block-microsoft-spynet-2009.html
... am I the only one who experienced serious hangups in IE8 after installing it on a 64bit Vista machine ? Tried it on 2 machines, with the same results.
Other than that : good stuff (I mostly use FF anyway), it got rid of a nasty bit of malware on an xp machine which would have had me digging otherwise.
@AC - yes the cheesy pop-ups are annoying but thats the price of freedom for a decent AV system.
My main concern was my total reliance on Avira for all my Windoze machines (8 and counting). And I do prefer Avira to the older freebies. So looks like I can now have a mix (not on the same PC of course) so if an AV system is compromised I will still have some protected systems.
People may argue that enterprise AV systems are better - but I'm surprised at the number of organisations that sign an enterprise contract so all their PCs have the identical protection - all vulnerable to either the same undetected virus or the almost certain snafus created by faulty updates.
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Microsoft develop and release software to protect their own software that was so badly coded in the first place that it now needs to be protected by another piece of software.
WOW, WELL FUCKING DONE MICROSOFT! and please all you MS shills don't give us that "well at least they're doing something about it" crap.
Now on a m$ system trying to get some work done is classed as suspicious behaviour, whilst viruses, malware, trojans, gaming and script kiddie exploits are classed as normal. Sounds like it hit the mark ?
The test results suggest promising performance with signature based detection but the heuristics side needs a lot more work. I'd say a good start, and right that it's free.
If they really want to make the m$ world a better place, then illegitimate windo$e systems should be able to run it too to help clean up the botnets.
@mrweekender - you spotted the irony too ???? ;-)
@frymaster - tend to agree with you, but it depends on what you're using the machine for. For example, Banking ? YES. Pissing about watching youtube, perhaps not unless the firewall shows spurious traffic. If I was looking to hide shitware on a system, I'd go for the OS libraries for disk access and corrupt them, so an attempt to read sector xyz returns benign data, so AV software thinks everything is OK on a scan. Guess where I'd hide the shitware ? Probably much harder to do on a journalling filesystem like NTFS or ext3, so maybe what I'm saying here isn't realistic. But still, I'd say that's justification enough for wipe/reinstall if you suddenly get new detection after updating/replacing your AV software on an important or business critical system.
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