Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) mainly focuses on malicious software functions, moderate processing capabilities, similar to OneCare. But still in beta, MSE promises to be more advanced and more important than MSE is free.

Strength:

In general, the ability to remove and prevent malicious software is quite strong. Downloadable file size is compact. Simple interface, easy to use.

Limit:

Less effective than rootkits, specialized rogue software is rare. Requires large installation space. Force users to set Windows Update mode completely automatically. There are no versions that support environment other than Windows.

According to user reviews, Windows Live OneCare is a disappointing product from Microsoft. So information on a new generation, security solution that’s free and free, can help protect you from the dangers of malicious software. That solution, which Microsoft originally planned to code Morro, has now been widely publicized for testing as Microsoft Security Essentials.

Microsoft expects commercial users to use Microsoft Forefront, but the two products use the same malware killer and similar data sets. The ability to protect users from online threats and malware is pretty good, but not really that great.

The download file is quite compact (about 7 MB), the installation process is fast. But the download time is quite long, 5 – 15 minutes. In addition, the installation space on the hard drive is up to 110MB, compared to the 7 MB installation too much difference.

The simple and easy-to-use interface shows the security status, which is easy to access for quick scan or full system. Occasionally there will be some jumping popup notification that detects a hazard, which is designed to handle in real time. But just click the clean button in the background. Microsoft Security Essentials relies on the Windows Update engine to receive new virus data, MSE forces the machine to run an automatic update mode, with many users not very experienced, especially experienced users. Often, we still want to control exactly when Windows will download or install an update.

Ability to remove malicious software: medium

Application notice during the scan “may take a few hours”. Tests on systems infected with some malware takes about 1 hour. When scanning on a standard clean system takes about 35 minutes. The installation process was no problem on all 12 machines infected with malware.

The overall performance, removal of malware of the product, generally moderate in the inspection process, is not really excellent. MSE detected 89% of malware samples and scored 7 / 10 points for the ability to remove, remove them compared to version Prevx 3.0. In the same test using dedicated kegloggers, MSE can only detect 30% and has a poor removal capability, only 1.8 / 10 points. However, the poor performance suggests that Microsoft has not yet integrated the ability to remove most of the software that records keyboard activity.

Although Microsoft claims the MSE is capable of responding to emerging threats and has many specialized features such as rootkits removal, in reality the security software is only capable of detecting 67% of all threats. Rootkit exploits and a score of only 4.9 in the ability to remove, below the average. Meanwhile, the same test, Hitman Pro can detect 100% and score 7.1.

Microsoft warns of an increasingly alarming threat of scareware (rogue security software) that uses malicious code or malicious tools to advertise or install itself or force users to pay for software removal. Toxic which in fact does not exist). However, its MSE has not really done what the giants have ever heard. MSE can detect only half of scareware samples and give up to 4.5 points of uninstall capability. One of the scareware killers is eScan Internet Security Suite 10 that scores 7.5 at kill, eliminate.

Real-time protection: pretty

On a clean install of Microsoft Security Essentials, to test the real-time protection, test team tried to download some samples of malware. The results show that MSE does not prevent access to sites containing malicious software. However, as soon as opening the folder containing the malware samples downloaded, MSE will mark their own and delete them. MSE is capable of cleaning up 2/3 of malware samples as well as variants of the same group.

When installing the remaining malware samples, MSE detected 83% and kill point was 7.9, below average level. Meanwhile, the Prevx security software for 9.4 points. In addition, Microsoft Security Essentials is the worst to face with a professional keylogger, only 40% probability and killer ability is only 2.3 points.

With rootkits, MSE detected 78% and successfully killed at 5.9 points, below average.