Microsoft Security Essentials is not good enough

I'm sensible when it comes to being safe on the internet. 99% of viruses come from people clicking on really stupid links.

I know plenty of people who will click on stupid links and get viruses. And yet I don't. I have MSE, Malwarebytes, and a Kaspersky root-kit killer which I run every so often to be sure.

And just who on earth ARE Malware Research Group? No recognisable mention in the news anywhere. Just results leading to their website, and claims they are bogus.

Interesting review of an older version of Emsisoft: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364196,00.asp Basically, it could find things, but not remove it.
 
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I'm not disputing them, but these results only show a narrow part of the picture. Without more details and information about the methodology you can ask as many questions as you can draw conclusions.
 
theheyes said:
I'm not disputing them, but these results only show a narrow part of the picture. Without more details and information about the methodology you can ask as many questions as you can draw conclusions.
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This.

The methodology and metrics used are the most important things here as are you priorities on what constitutes that most prevalent attack vector.
 
madindehead said:
I'm sensible when it comes to being safe on the internet. 99% of viruses come from people clicking on really stupid links.

I know plenty of people who will click on stupid links and get viruses. And yet I don't. I have MSE, Malwarebytes, and a Kaspersky root-kit killer which I run every so often to be sure.

And just who on earth ARE Malware Research Group? No recognisable mention in the news anywhere. Just results leading to their website, and claims they are bogus.

Interesting review of an older version of Emsisoft: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364196,00.asp Basically, it could find things, but not remove it.
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I've never even used Emsisoft, nor am I recommending it. Not sure what value linking to an older version brings. Did you know that Windows 95 has some problems? Better not buy Windows 7.

There are too many people on this forum recommending MSE as the be all and end all of security, I'm trying to help show why that's a mistake.
 
wjfcomputers said:
Malware these days is targeted and lots of viruses delete themselves. You may have been infected for a few minutes, hours or days. By the time Microsoft have written a signature for the threat and your machine has downloaded it, it's too late - and you have no idea that your data has been stolen.

Please stop recommending MSE on this forum without doing some more research.
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microsoft update MSE sometime 2 times a day other AV`s your lucky if its every few days and some once aweek
 
wjfcomputers said:
I've never even used Emsisoft, nor am I recommending it. Not sure what value linking to an older version brings. Did you know that Windows 95 has some problems? Better not buy Windows 7.

There are too many people on this forum recommending MSE as the be all and end all of security, I'm trying to help show why that's a mistake.
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No one ever CLAIMED it was the be all and end all of security.

I was linking to it, simply because it was the only review I could find of software by the company.

Finding viruses/malware is one thing. Removing them is another. And both reviews of the older versions of the software mentioned, that whilst it was good at finding malicious software, seemed to be pretty terrible at removing it. Pretty standard for virus software wouldn't you say so?
 
ShakenNstirred said:
microsoft update MSE sometime 2 times a day other AV`s your lucky if its every few days and some once aweek
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This is a common misconception. Why do you think its acceptable to have to wait until the vendor releases an update before you're infected? Having to wait several hours before your AV updates leaves your data exposed during an unacceptably long window of exposure.
 
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wjfcomputers said:
Do a search for MSE on this forum.
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I know what you're talking about.

The people who recommend it, still recommend you have Malwarebytes also, and still don't claim it's 100% perfect.

A lot of what you malware you get on your PC is down to how you go about using the internet, no matter what software you have!
 
So you're saying that heuristics are the be all and end all of AV. Fair enough, but that depends what you want from an AV. Without definitions, you may be able to alert the user to potentially malicious software (and no heuristics are 100% accurate or even near that), but you won't know how to effectively clean the software. You don't know what operations the malware has performed before you picked up malicious changes. Furthermore, heuristics by their very nature have a high performance overhead. Not everyone wants to trade off that sort of overhead.

MSE doesn't necessarily have to be the best to be recommended, it just needs to be good enough for most users, which it is.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
So you're saying that heuristics are the be all and end all of AV. Fair enough, but that depends what you want from an AV. Without definitions, you may be able to alert the user to potentially malicious software (and no heuristics are 100% accurate or even near that), but you won't know how to effectively clean the software. You don't know what operations the malware has performed before you picked up malicious changes. Furthermore, heuristics by their very nature have a high performance overhead. Not everyone wants to trade off that sort of overhead.

MSE doesn't necessarily have to be the best to be recommended, it just needs to be good enough for most users, which it is.
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I'm not talking about heuristics. ;)
 
Burnsy2023 said:
So you protect against zero day vulnerabilities by what other means?
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It's a pointless argument with this guy (Op).

We, the good people of Windows & Other Software have been recommending and using MSE for many, many years now and nobody has come back to say that they've had a major failure because of it. And now all of a sudden MSE should not be recommended to people because it's apparently rubbish and the only citations being put forward are specific tests geared toward things that MSE isn't designed for (along with most other competing AV packages).

Wow.
 
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