MS security essentials, good or trash?

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provoko

Gawd
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
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Has anyone seen a flood of complaints against MS security essentials? So far, a few of my friends have used it have gotten viruses. It's NOT extraordinary considering the same amount of people get viruses using norton/avg or something else.

What IS extraordinary: I recently installed security essentials or recommended it to them and they got viruses right away.

So what's the verdict, security essentials, good or trash?

Thanks for the input.
 
good. sounds like your friends aren't very intelligent. Tell them if they are going to look at porn or view questionable material to do it in a virtual machine or look up sandbox, etc, etc
 
What OS was it installed on? Were their patches up-to-date? etc...

Did they really get a "virus" or were they running some vulnerable version of something like Flash, Acrobat, Java, etc which allowed an unauthenticated user to execute hostile code on their machine with elevated privileges?

Often the latter will not be stopped by any anti-virus product since it does not detect the problem until after the code runs and by then it's too late. That's not to mention most sophisticated attacks can easily obscure themselves from all the common antiv engines.

Tell your friends to stay away from teh go4ts3 sites and shady torrent portals...

MSE is a decent lightweight product.
 
I've never had any trouble with it except for some false positives on certain porn sites; it does seem to catch everything and the price is right.
 
I think it's more along the lines of your friends didn't know they had any viruses on their comptuers then they installed MSE and they "got a virus". That's not quite the right way to think about it. It's more along the lines of it found some baddies lurking in the shadows that they may have had for a while and took 'em out for them.

MSE is one of the better if not the best free AV. It may not be the best among all the different AV's out there, but it's MUCH better then having nothing at all :cool:
 
I think switching FROM IE to another browser will do more than the virus scanner. I recommend testing for yourself too. If you clean off all viruses and start using Firefox or Chrome, then you will probably decrease if not stop most of the malware you receive. I used Win 7 and Chrome with normal usage and had no viruses when I installed 2 different virus scanners(second because the first didn't find anything) and also tried malware bytes. I think IE is probably causing most if not all of your malware issues.
 
thought it was good but installed it for a friends uncle after taking AVG off and he ended up getting "security tool 2011" after a week.

so i dont know anymore
 
I just installed this the other day thru Windows update so I dont have a verdict on it yet but Im gonna give it a chance. Generally I hate virus programs like this cause they always seem to be an issue while running in the background but after a couple days, this has been pretty transparent.
 
MSE is great against viruses and malware; Not so great against idiot users.

If they are going to click Yes or OK on stuff they shouldn't be clicking on, that is beyond the scope of MSE.
 
GotNoRice said:
MSE is great against viruses and malware; Not so great against idiot users.

If they are going to click Yes or OK on stuff they shouldn't be clicking on, that is beyond the scope of MSE.
Click to expand...

No av will stop idiot users. And i always try to make this very clear to them as they get this impression they are invincible. SE is very good tho in my opinion,
 
I love Ms av software, works really good.

Surfing porn or movies should be done on a vmware os like ubuntu running inside a VM, that way you don't get any viruses or spyware on the main machine.

It's the new way to surf pron yo!
 
I use it on my personal PCs. Used to use Kaspersky until they started to bloat the crap out of it. Needed something slimmed down and so far so good. I also recommend it to family and friends. Used to recommend Avast but now recommend strictly MS Security Essentials.
 
+1 for the MSE

I used it from the beginning ( beta, early days ) and it's a nice piece of software. It's " free ", it won't pop up every 2 minutes showing pro advertising or other craps, and it's rather effective. If you are unsure about it's detection rate, pair it with mbam, and you're done.


As other guys told, there is no efficient antivirus for the idiot user.

@dashpuppy: Darn, great tip, thx. Also, pornhub is great, no malware.
 
I have put it on a bunch of computers for clients. I have had some get viruses on their computers, but I don't think the problem is with MSE. The problem is somewhere between the chair and the keyboard.
 
provoko said:
Has anyone seen a flood of complaints against MS security essentials? So far, a few of my friends have used it have gotten viruses. It's NOT extraordinary considering the same amount of people get viruses using norton/avg or something else.

What IS extraordinary: I recently installed security essentials or recommended it to them and they got viruses right away.

So what's the verdict, security essentials, good or trash?
Click to expand...

When you installed MSE for your friends, did you also update their Windows, Java, and Adobe PDF/Flash/and Shockwave? Because if you didn't....well...you missed the most important thing...so what good was your time spent?

Microsoft has finally gotten their products quite secure....so malware writers are turning to 3rd party software exploits to spread their malware. This is a fact, not an opinion.

Yeah years ago it was smarter to use other browsers like Firefox versus Internet Explorer....but since Internet Explorer 8 came out..they're quite equal now. Actually IE8 has enjoyed some months of having less exploits than Firefox. AND...going back to the facts that malware is more commonly spreading through web players like Java and Flash...those are platform neutral..doesn't matter of it's running in IE or Firefox or running on Windows or CrApple or *nix.

Is MSE the best AV out there? Nope. But I find it dang good, and importantly for me..it's easy to use for home users. And I find it pretty dang effective.

Here is another point to ponder....while most AV products average about 96% in detection of traditional viruses, they are averaging only about 60 - 65% against rogues/fake alert malware. Lets think about that for a minute....so that means about 1 in 3 rogues will slip past ANY brand out there.

Through my work...I sit down at computers with an awful lot of different AV brands...and I see rogues slip past them all. For home users, I see rogues slip past AntiVir, Avast, this past weekend I fixed one of my wifes friends PC that had TrendMicro installed and a rogue slipped past it. Yanked off Trend, put on MSE...right away it started cleaning stuff Trend never saw. End of last week another friends PC has Norton 2011 on it..and her PC has some quirks. Off with 2011, on with MSE....found 3 things right away that Norton 2011 never saw. Couple of weeks ago stopped by a buddies house with an issue, he had AntiVir on it....and a rogue got on the system. 2 weeks ago a client brought their home computer into our office for work..they had Avast on it...had a rogue. I see rogues get past Eset, Kaspersky, Panda, McAfee, Sophos, AVG (lol), PCTools, they get through!

The only things I've seen work against these rogues......a layered approach!
*DNS filtering...many FREE DNS services out there which filter out known malware distribution sites...OpenDNS was one of the originals, but there are MANY more now. Symantec, Comodo, ScrubIT, etc.

*UTM firewalls instead of plain NAT routers. At my business clients where I've installed a UTM like Untangle....my malware issues at that site have taken a drastic drop. Scanning of web traffic by a couple of extra scanners of different brands really makes a difference.

*Keep Microsoft updated, and keep your web players and PDF products updated
 
MSE works great no complaints.
As mentioned no AV will fix a user issue. Need to update any and all programs and the OS on a system to even have a chance at a virus free pc.
Sounds like your "friends" are the issue not MSE.
 
I currently have Norton Antiviru 2011, with a paid subscription running out in 347 days. Do you think that it is a good idea to install MSE 2.0 along with Norton antivirus? Does that count as a good "layered approach in security?"


YeOldeStonecat said:
When you installed MSE for your friends, did you also update their Windows, Java, and Adobe PDF/Flash/and Shockwave? Because if you didn't....well...you missed the most important thing...so what good was your time spent?

Microsoft has finally gotten their products quite secure....so malware writers are turning to 3rd party software exploits to spread their malware. This is a fact, not an opinion.

Yeah years ago it was smarter to use other browsers like Firefox versus Internet Explorer....but since Internet Explorer 8 came out..they're quite equal now. Actually IE8 has enjoyed some months of having less exploits than Firefox. AND...going back to the facts that malware is more commonly spreading through web players like Java and Flash...those are platform neutral..doesn't matter of it's running in IE or Firefox or running on Windows or CrApple or *nix.

Is MSE the best AV out there? Nope. But I find it dang good, and importantly for me..it's easy to use for home users. And I find it pretty dang effective.

Here is another point to ponder....while most AV products average about 96% in detection of traditional viruses, they are averaging only about 60 - 65% against rogues/fake alert malware. Lets think about that for a minute....so that means about 1 in 3 rogues will slip past ANY brand out there.

Through my work...I sit down at computers with an awful lot of different AV brands...and I see rogues slip past them all. For home users, I see rogues slip past AntiVir, Avast, this past weekend I fixed one of my wifes friends PC that had TrendMicro installed and a rogue slipped past it. Yanked off Trend, put on MSE...right away it started cleaning stuff Trend never saw. End of last week another friends PC has Norton 2011 on it..and her PC has some quirks. Off with 2011, on with MSE....found 3 things right away that Norton 2011 never saw. Couple of weeks ago stopped by a buddies house with an issue, he had AntiVir on it....and a rogue got on the system. 2 weeks ago a client brought their home computer into our office for work..they had Avast on it...had a rogue. I see rogues get past Eset, Kaspersky, Panda, McAfee, Sophos, AVG (lol), PCTools, they get through!

The only things I've seen work against these rogues......a layered approach!
*DNS filtering...many FREE DNS services out there which filter out known malware distribution sites...OpenDNS was one of the originals, but there are MANY more now. Symantec, Comodo, ScrubIT, etc.

*UTM firewalls instead of plain NAT routers. At my business clients where I've installed a UTM like Untangle....my malware issues at that site have taken a drastic drop. Scanning of web traffic by a couple of extra scanners of different brands really makes a difference.

*Keep Microsoft updated, and keep your web players and PDF products updated
Click to expand...
 
No, don't run more than one anti-x product on a single host. A "layered approach" means you aren't relying on a single point to provide protection. For example you have a "UTM" type firewall that performs IPS and application layer filtering, i.e. scanning email, attachments, downloaded files, etc before they ever reach your PC in addition to anti-virus.

At home I use a Cisco router running a zone-based firewall and intrusion prevention. On my hosts I have a mix of MSE, NOD32 and McAfee depending on what OS it is. I also perform off-line scans using MBAM and WinMHR periodically. That's an example of "layered security".
 
mattjw916 said:
No, don't run more than one anti-x product on a single host. A "layered approach" means you aren't relying on a single point to provide protection. For example you have a "UTM" type firewall that performs IPS and application layer filtering, i.e. scanning email, attachments, downloaded files, etc before they ever reach your PC in addition to anti-virus.

At home I use a Cisco router running a zone-based firewall and intrusion prevention. On my hosts I have a mix of MSE, NOD32 and McAfee depending on what OS it is. I also perform off-line scans using MBAM and WinMHR periodically. That's an example of "layered security".
Click to expand...

Ok, I see. I will stick with Norton then.
 
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