Microsoft Security Essentials Antivirus

It’s finally time that Microsoft step their ‘anti-virus’ game up. The big company is now offering a free antivirus product available for everyone to use. Don’t have money to spend on commercial products? Then using a free alternative is a no-brainer. The question is, how will their product, dubbed Microsoft Security Essentials, compare to other more popular and also free antivirus products that have already been on the market long before this?

If you still haven’t decided the need to use a antivirus product on your machine, than you are sorely missing out. There is a geek saying and methodology that if you use common sense when using a computer, you don’t necessarily need any antivirus or other security products. In my honest opinion, that is a load of crap. That way of thinking could have worked before the boom of the Internet but not anymore.

People need to realize that getting infected with viruses and other malware now days does NOT boil down to just ‘watching what you download and install’ or using ‘common sense’ when browsing the Internet. In this age of computing, hackers and malware distributors have evolved their thinking and are not just those mindless zombies that choose quantity over quality. Now days, visiting just a infected website can infect your computer with malware. Just by visiting it, yes you heard right! Without antivirus software, your computer wouldn’t be able to detect the infection and so there goes your machine right out the window (the bad news is you wouldn’t even know you were infected in the first place). Anyways, I’ll probably debate on that topic in one of my discussion articles but for now, I want to let everyone know that having a antivirus product installed is very much essential in this day and age.

There are many free antivirus offerings on the market right now but it always seem to get more interesting when the company providing it is none other than Microsoft themselves. Microsoft have in the past provided an antivirus solution for consumers in the name of Live One Care but that service was not free. Also, after reading many reviews of it, they ranked one of the worst products when it comes to detecting and removing malwares. Microsoft have now scrapped Windows Live One Care (existing customers still get support) and have thus replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials. The product touts to be easy to use (very important in my opinion), able to detect the newest malwares, and doesn’t bog your system down like how other antivirus products seem to do. Let’s take a closer look at the product.

 

Microsoft Security Essentials

1. You can download Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) from here. You need to have a genuine copy of Windows in order to actually install it. Please download the right version and language for your operating system if you are given a choice. There is an offering for Windows XP 32bit and Windows Vista/7 both 32bit and 64bit versions. Sorry XP 64bit users! The download weighs in at around 8.6MB. Not bad!

2. Installation is as straight forward as it can be. Accept the license agreement (in a nutshell, you can’t use MSE in a business environment) and wait for the validity check. Once they are done, you are now ready to install. Simply click the Install button. At the end of the installation, you have the option of letting MSE scan your computer after it has grabbed the latest definition files.

3. As you can see, MSE has a minimalist interface to make it as easy to use as possible. Honestly, if you have a hard time using this application, you really should reconsider using a computer in general! Let’s go over MSE in details with each tab.

In the Home tab, you’ll quickly get to know your current protection status. As the website mentioned, if you see a green checkmark, you are good to go! Here you are also allowed to manually configure a scan of your computer. You can do a quick scan which scans pre-determined locations on your hard drive, a full scan which will scan basically everything, or a custom scan which allows you to scan a location of your choosing. On the bottom, you’ll also see when the next scheduled scan is to take place.

In the Update tab, you’re allowed to update the antivirus definition files to stay up to date with the newest threats. Remember, your antivirus product is only as good as the definition file it’s using to scan your computer. If you don’t update them often, the software will not be able to detect the newer threats. Therefore, it’s imperative that you update those definition files. The good news is that usually, this will be done for you automatically but it never hurts to do a manual check.

Next up is History. Here you can glance at what malware, if any, has been detected by MSE since its installation. Quarantine items are safely locked away by MSE and cannot do any harm to your computer. It is up to you whether to delete those potentially malicious files or to restore them. Quarantining an item has the benefit that you can go online and manually search about the file. If the file is not malicious after careful consideration, you have the option to bring that file out of quarantine.

Last up is the Settings tab and it is here that most of the configuration can be done to MSE. Each option is explained by MSE so you’ll never feel lost or confused. I believe using the default options is sufficient for most casual users. I, however hate scheduled scans so it’s always one of the first options I disable when using a antivirus product.

4. Now that you have seen the interface for MSE, it’s time to take it for a spin. Let’s see how it reacts to opening a potentially malicious file. Once again, I’ll use the simple EICAR test file to show you an example of how MSE behaves when it detects something bad. EICAR is a standard malware test file that should be recognized by all antivirus products. It’s nothing more than a file with some strings of characters that the antivirus product should flag as a virus or malware. The EICAR site hosts the file in several different formats. You can visit the site as well to perform this simple test.
If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see you’re allowed to download the files. Let’s see what happens when I click on the Eicar.com file first.

As you can see, MSE quickly detected that it was a malicious file before I had a chance to download it. Other free antivirus products I’ve used in the past didn’t alert me like this. It allowed me to continue with the download and only when I tried to run it or do a manual scan on the file did it flag the file. While this may not be a concern to some people (it actually still flagged the file as bad), I’m particularly picky. I want to actually know ahead of time whether or not a file is potentially a baddy or not.
However, as I downloaded the .zip file with the eicar.com inside it, MSE allowed it to go through just as with the other antivirus products I’ve mentioned above. With my current free Avast! edition installed, it notified me as well that this was a bad file. The good news for MSE is that as soon as I completed the download, MSE flagged it and allowed me to take action on it. If I now look back at the History tab, I’ll notice that the virus I’ve just downloaded is now in the list.

5. MSE weighs in at around 45MB, give or take. Not bad actually. The good news is that the application is very responsive and scanning for items is quick and snappy as well. Microsoft promised to provide a fast, easy to use antivirus application and they indeed delivered on that promise.

Thanks to a certain anonymous comment from a user, he made me realize that the initial method I used to measure the memory usage of MSE was incorrect and indeed it was. So I apologize for making the mistake. I initially said that MSE only took up 4MB of memory but that was only the user interface (I should have gotten the hint under the user description of tasks manager).

 

In the End…

Time will tell whether or not MSE will live up to the standards of the other free antivirus products. I obviously don’t have a bunch of viruses and other malware to test on it but I’m sure other security researchers have and so I’ll wait for their detailed reports before giving this a thumbs up or thumbs down. However, I have to admit that using the program was fairly easy. Everything was where it should belong and using the green color as good and red as bad method works really well, which should further help out casual users. Currently I have replaced Avast! with MSE on my main Windows 7 laptop just to use it a bit longer. Unlike Avast!, MSE does not require you to enter or register for any product key at all before being able to use the product. I’ve always urged others to use Avast! but have always struggled to explain the part about registering for a key and where to input that key in the program. That alone put off many people. With MSE, it’s a set it and forget it ordeal. Once installed, it should hardly require any maintenance. If you have family members that aren’t quite up to date yet with all these security issues about viruses and malware, installing MSE on their computers can help a lot.

Update:
Security Essentials fares well in AV-Test trial
PCMag’s Security Essentials 1.0 Review
Paul Thurrott’s Security Essential Review