Microsoft Security Essentials in Beta
Microsoft released its new Security Essentials in beta today. So far, the reports are that it’s nice. I don’t run Windows except within VMWare, so I’m not going to be testing it out anytime soon, but I’d love to hear what you think about it.
However, the security essentials will only work on “genuine” windows systems. Microsoft fought this battle before with security patches. They had initially said that security patches would only be available for “genuine” systems. However, that would have left an awful lot of systems vulnerable to attackers just because they were not legit (I’d love to see a statistic on what percentage aren’t). This is the same type of thing. Security is only available for those who go through the effort of getting their system checked (I know I’ve been canceling that particular window for the last few months). As long as other anti-virus makers are willing to step up and keep anti-virus available for those who don’t hassle with WGA, we won’t see any problems, but I suspect we might see botnets form more easily otherwise.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I actually just installed it on my Windows7 machine at home. I plan on doing an extensive test and comparing it to my all time favorite Nod32 – I’ll also pull up some reports from others to try and put together a feature rich comparison.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
“http://twitter.com/mubix”:@mubix pointed me to “http://twitter.com/Rafallos”:@RafalLos ’s “road test”:http://preachsecurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/microsoft-security-essentials-road-test.html of Microsoft Security Essentials. It didn’t fair tremendously well.