Whats Your Opininon?

Rico · Feb 23, 2013

The brouhaha over MSE
Extracted from Cloudeight InfoAve Premium - Issue #488 - February 22, 2013

All Windows users,

There's been a lot of negative news lately regarding Microsoft Security Essentials failing some tests at a Germany-based anti-virus testing lab. And many computer tips and tricks sites which once highly recommended MSE have jumped ship because of this.

We are not jumping ship and here's why. The files used to test antivirus programs are not the kind that 99.99% of you will ever encounter. They are viruses which are not found "in the wild", they are specifically designed to trip-up antivirus software. The way that most antivirus programs work is by using definition files (of known viruses) and heuristics to detect new or unknown viruses. This is where MSE fell short in the testing lab. Its heuristics were not as sensitive as other programs and hence it missed some of these test viruses.

Microsoft says they are working on this, but we're going to tell you that MSE will protect you just as well as McAfee, Norton, Avast, AVG, Panda, Trend Micro -- and with a whole lot less annoyances.

Additionally, MSE ranks #1 in not showing false positives. And false positives are scary for most folks. Almost all of you would be alarmed if your anti-virus warning dialog came up and said you had downloaded an infected file -- and in many cases these are false positive. Norton is the worst we've ever seen for detecting viruses in files which are clean -- Avast has been known to show many false positives as well. But you'll rarely see one with MSE

And let us state another fact too -- the biggest danger you face isn't from viruses anyway -- it's from rogue antivirus programs and badware like Ask Toolbar, FunWebProducts, Babylon toolbar -- etc. And there isn't an anti-virus we know of that protects you from these. Only your own good common sense backed-up with Malwarebytes is going to keep your computer free from these nuisances and threats.

So, despite the negative publicity that has surrounded MSE recently, we stand fast in our support for it and we continue to recommend it. We use it on our own personal and business computers as do our friends and family members. And after months and months and months of using it neither of us has ever been infected with a virus -- nor have any of our friends or family members who use MSE.

We've received many letters from folks who use MSE who claimed we steered them wrong, because they were using MSE and got infected. It turns out that in all of those cases, what they were infected with was a rogue and not a virus. McAfee, or Norton, or Avast, or AVG, or Trend Micro or Panda or any other antivirus we know of will not protect you from rogues, and neither will MSE.

We continue to recommend MSE (Windows Defender on Windows . And we will continue to do so until someone comes up with some evidence that MSE users are at risk of becoming infected with viruses that are in the wild (on the Web) -- ones they are even remotely likely to encounter.
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Note: I clean machines for a very large club, who's members are very ignorant, regarding computer security, & on a continual basis, become infected. The club promotes MSE heavily, now I regularly see/clean, machines with a crippled MSE which are routinely heavily infected. IMO better free AV's exist now than MSE.

Cudni · Feb 23, 2013

see for opinions plenty
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=322765

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