I've come to the conclusion that...

MSE just does not work. I've seen it time and time again from people that ask me to clean their PC's, and with my own PC and my brothers.

My brother used Comodo for a long time never an infection. He installs MSE and the next day, his kid gets one of those hostage ware viruses.

I've seen some bad av in my time, but this one is crap!

Just as a side note, these aren't the kind of people that use torrents or Limewire or stuff of that nature, or surf the dark side.

 

Well, MSE obviously does work, if tests (real tests, not Youtube) are anything to go by. Is it the very top of the line? No. I think we dealt with this issue in the "AVG sucks" thread as well. They won't catch everything, none will, ever. If you're truly noticing problems with MSE on various systems, and not just one infection on your brothers system (and not yet another ad for Comodo), then don't recommend MSE to anyone, and don't use it yourself. Pretty much solves the problem without another "This sucks!" thread.

 

How about clicking OK or allow to every prompt as kids do? I'm sure there are people that surf with absolutely nothing but a fully patched OS and don't infected. Does that mean we should all do the same? I for one am not smart enough to do that. Your time would be better spent looking at the tendencies of the people who have you clean their PC's. No Av can protect against what's between the chair and the key board.

 

All that is required is to understand the infection vectors. Once you understand that, the rest is easy.

 

MSE works just fine. Will it be the best solution for each person and every system? Of course not.

People here, and elsewhere, are raving about Avast. V6 proved to be the worst program (of any type) that I've installed in quite sometime. While I will never recommend it, I realize some (many) or firmly in the Avast camp and that it works fine for them.

At any rate, I've been running it on two systems with no negative effects. At all.

 

I m not against MSE , but in any way , I m glad that u changed it

 

try norton internet security 2011 but ites need money
or
try avast 6 free

good luck

 

Mse work just fine on my sister system, she doesn't have a clue about securing her laptop.

But I use mbam realtime alongside

For me mse is good additional layer of protection, not to used alone

 

I do the same. (See my signature.)
As far as I can tell, it works seamlessly and securely.

 

When MSE first came out with 1.0 it was something I recommended. I gave it a test on my personal machine and found how slow it was at adding real-life threats to its database. A month for a koobface that was circulating through facebook multiple people got infected through. I know Panda had detected that particular threat before it even made its way to my Facebook wall. MSE also lacks self-protection. It has the worst self-protection I've seen. A lot of fake-antiviruses can simply shut MSE down without any word from it. And disallow you to open it any more.

Overall, MSE has a lot of work ahead of it before it can compare itself to the "big boys".

 

Using MSE since a long time paired with sandboxie and no problem at all.I find it really good for my limited needs and i always come back to it.I have a paid key for avast internet security but find MSE works best for my notebook ...

 

Well,

What I don't like about MSE? [1] Whereas other antiviruses like Avast! etc. that “make” decisions by “themselves” when a threat is found, MSE has ALWAYS to prompt the user to accept or decline removing the threat. I really dislike that kind of approach.

If it's a virus/Trojan etc., just GO AHEAD and GET RID of IT !!! Don't interrupt me with silly questions like: “Fake AV Security Tool is on your PC, click here to delete it from system”... Come on !

[2] When using a USB thumb drive, the Read/Write process is slow to a crawl when MSE is running on real-time. Copying or accessing files on the thumb drive is extremely slow. I've never seen this kind behavior with NOD32 or Avast!

[3] Why there is no option to disable real-time scanning on .zip, .rar files ??
No antivirus that I've used before has this setting enabled to cope with system drag. Why not just scan upon extracting whatever is in the archive?

Until Microsoft corrects these drawbacks with MSE I can't really recommend it to anyone. And...yes, it lets slip through a lot a fake AVs.


Regards,


Carlos

 

Three more drawbacks.
1) With MSE installed a folder full with exe files is hard to load.
2) Still updates through windows update channnel or you can schedule it manually before scheduled scan. Update scheduling with commandline parameters open annoying command prompt with during update.
3) Poor Self-Protection.

Other than that I have hardly any complain against MSE.

 

Instead of staring at the main screen, try the configuration tab for once

1) You can change the default action to Quarantine/delete under the button "default actions"
2) You can try to change the realtime scanner to scan read/write only.
3) try the advanced button, there's a option in there to not scan archives. Otherwise you can exclude certain filetypes under the "excluded file types" tab.

As they all say It's very hard to get infected through a legitimate website (except if it is hacked).

 

As far as point #1 is concerned check your settings and change your settings. Go to default Actions and use recomended settings and you wont't be bothered with questions re trojans etc.

 

This is exactly what happened. When I look to see why the PC was infected MSE was shut down by the Malware.

 

You can change real-time protection to monitor incoming only. That means it doesn't scan files already on your drive, but only newly created ones.

 

Explain that to the average PC user.

 

It is important to realize that MSE provides very different levels of protection depending on your platform. Look at the certifications at av-test.org - MSE fails on XP and passes on W7 and Vista.

 

I felt the same about Avast when the program was still young, but later revisions were much improved. I like Avast, although I have not used it in years.

Don't know much about 6 either, and one of the nags I had with Avast in the past is when it did find an infection it was not real good at clean-up.

 

Interesting. Did not seem to help my brother though, and he was running Vista, but luckily the malware he got was one of the worst designs I've seen for hostage ware.

It was like the Bevus&Butthead version: Umm, like you can't use your PC right now hehe-hhmm-hmm, but if you put your PC in safe mode I come off real easy.

 

Oh! I somehow missed that option... thanks

 

I'm afraid that task would have to be yours; that is, to explain it to your brother. If he refuses, that's another story.

-edit-

I see your brother is running Windows Vista. There's a great start. Does he use a standard user account? If not, why not? Is there a reason for using an administrator account, if he's using such type of account? Which browser is used? What mitigations exist around the web browser? If such mitigations fail, what else exists? E-mail client - which mitigation exist around it? What else exists that could stop something bad from happening, if such mitigation fail? Etc...

Unfortunately, the user cannot be excluded from the system's security.

 

I'm not running MSE at the moment or for the last two months. Before uninstalling, it had self protection best I can remember. The GUI/services can be shut down but they are quickly started back up. Their implementation of self protection is one of the reasons I don't use it anymore. There is no way to set an allow HIPS rule for it because after a shut down of the services, a random unique identifier is used to restart the service. Also, the service is shut down and started up frequently during MSE updates.