It looks like MS got it right this time. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a winner and I am very happy about it. Some of you old f@rts may remember long ago MS tried to get into the anti-virus business. But Norton, McAfee, CA, and a few of the other early AV makers cried and whined to Congress that MS was trying to take over the world, and push them out of business. They claimed MS was an OS company. Congress agreed. Microsoft was forced out of the security business, was forced to weigh legacy support of old (often DOS era), unsecured HW and SW over security. As a result of that greed and stupidity, malware control has gone downhill, and the very real threat to consumers and their families has increasingly worsened ever since. Why? I've said it before, but will again here: The anti-malware industry has absolutely NO incentive to rid the world of malware. Doing so puts them out of business. The big telecommunications carriers and equipment makers (BT, ATT, MCI, Sprint, Nokia, Cisco, the bankrupt Nortel, and others) are at fault too. Why? Money. They would much rather sell you bigger pipes and more hardware to process all that bad traffic, instead of blocking the malware (and spam - estimated to be up to 90% of the data) at the origin (or at least at the borders of corrupt countries) - which would be easier to do if our "leaders" in the United Nations would do something about it - ANYTHING other than flap their lips.

So MS was forced to get out of the security business and everybody suffered - except Norton, McAfee, CA, ZA, AVG, and the others who profit on our woes. Of course MS got slammed for lousy security by the biased MS bashing IT media, including those who simply hate Microsoft and Bill Gates because they are American, or because they represent (to them) corporate greed, and by those very AV makers who said Microsoft could not do security.

Starting with the purchase of the highly rated Giant Anti-spyware (later renamed Windows Defender - now replaced by MSE), MS has gotten serious as Microsoft absolutely DOES have an incentive to rid the world of malware as that would allow its user base to compute in safety, and eliminate the undue, and unjust MS bashing - (there's enough fodder for pundits for bad press for stuff that MS IS responsible for).

I've been testing and running MSE and Windows Firewall on my Win7 system and I like it - a lot!

Tom's Hardware
Paul Thurrott - WInSuperSite,
ARSTechnica

As always, opinions vary:
- http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7204
Last Updated: 2009-09-30 01:59:48 UTC - "... It will provide you with malware detection and removal ONLY. So do -not- rely on this as your one stop shop for security. It does not have the features and functionality that many of the AV vendors provide in their products. Think of this as the AV as it used to be in 2000 or so..."

... and use caution if looking for it on the Web - see this post (SEO poisoning):
- http://forums.whatthetech.com/Search_Engin...st&p=599840

Download URL for it is here:
- http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials

.

Oh? How? He seems pleased with the detect rates and stated the install was straight forward. Even so, I am not sure the word of a plain ol' poster on ICS is much of a rebuttal. So I can't accept that opinion as significant - even though it does not really offer any criticism. In an attempt to avoid such controversy, I posted links to respected review and noted expert sites, and not from anonymous posters. Which, IMO is EXACTLY what we need. The problem with nearly ALL the others anti-malware programs is they try to add all kinds of fancy, and useless bells and whistles (AKA, bloat), rolled into one big bloated UI, all of which do nothing but hog resources, bog systems down, are next to impossible to remove, and do NOT increase security. So GIVE ME the AV of 2000!!!!! As long as it protects my system from today's malware, and does not bog my system down, that's what I want! The fact of the matter is, MSE is basically Live OneCare, minus all the bloat of a firewall, performance tuning, backup and restore and other unnecessary features - in other words, just the "essentials".

Of course now it is up to Microsoft to stay true to their word, and keep if free, and able. And it is up to the IT media to keep their biases about MS at bay, and give MSE a fair shake in the reviews.

OK, fair enough:
- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityf...softs_free.html
September 30, 2009 - "... AV-Test's Andreas Marx said the group's testing found MSE had no effective "dynamic detection" against a handful of very recently released malware samples. Still, Marx said, other anti-virus-only offerings don't appear to offer much in the way of dynamic detection either. "In most cases they are only available in the Internet Security Suites editions of the products," Marx said. Marx said testing showed that MSE's scanning speed was about average, but that the product excelled at detecting and removing "rootkits," stealthy software designed to burrow deep into the operating system in a bid to hide the presence of malicious files. AV-Test also found that the product effectively removed malware threats, but often times left behind certain inactive components of the threat (e.g. some inactive executable files, empty "Run" entries in the Registry, the Windows firewall remains disabled, the "hosts" file remains modified)..."

.

Huh? Okay, inactive components and orphaned registry entries I get - that problem is not exclusive to MSE, BTW, and indicates more than just a malicious download, but that something was executed too. But to complain it "leaves" Windows Firewall disabled? What does that mean? It does not disable it and I would not want any program to start up Windows Firewall if I was not using it. Nor would I want any program to dink with my hosts file. Too bad the Post does not show where Andreas said that.

PCMag is not enchanted with it.

We'll see if I keep it or not. That said, I keep my systems patched and updated, behind a firewall (even if only WF), behind a router, void of spam, and I pay attention to where I'm going, what I click on, and what I download and open. If everyone did that, malware would be marginalized.