Microsoft's new security suite drawing generally positive reviews, especially for the price
Friday, October 2, 2009
While major commercial anti-viruses cost $60 or $70 per year for the software and continuous updates, Microsoft Security Essentials doesn't cost a dime. Experts say that this could be a game-changing development in the field of anti-virus software.
Early reviews indicate that MSE stacks up reasonably well against its for-pay competitors, earning average to strong reviews in most areas. Andreas Marx, of online anti-virus software tester AV-Test told the New York Times that, while MSE did not perform effective "dynamic detection" of cutting-edge malware samples, neither did much of the competition.
MSE is said to perform particularly well against rootkits, which are subtle pieces of malicious code that hide themselves and other malware programs from conventional anti-virus detection. The program itself is relatively small compared to its competitors, in part because many of the features of conventional security suites are built-in to Windows.
Some of the competition is not happy with the Redmond giant's newest release. Mike Plante, writing for Symantec's Norton Protection Blog, says that "MSE appears to be nothing more than a bad rerun of Microsoft’s infamous history of offering consumers incomplete and ineffective protection."
Related News:
UK cops arrest two in Zbot Trojan case - 11.19.2009
The British Metropolitan Police took two suspected cyber criminals into custody earlier this month in connection with an investigation into the Zbot banking Trojan.
Facebook shakes up privacy policy in response to criticism - 11.19.2009
After a week-long comment period in which 7,000 Facebook users voiced their opinions, the giant social media network announced that it would overhaul and simplify its privacy policy.
Domain registrar VeriSign will receive "major security update" by 2011 - 11.19.2009
A well-known security vulnerability in the way .com and .net websites process DNS values - the way alphanumeric website names are translated into numeric web addresses - will be fixed, but not until 2011, according to a report from tech news website ZDNet.
Malware attack targeting fans of Twilight series - 11.18.2009
As with many recent hot news trends, the upcoming release of the second movie based on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books has attracted the attention not just of the vampire wannabes, but of actual cyber criminals as well.
Giant black-hat SEO campaign funnels victims to scareware sites - 11.18.2009
Security researchers say that cyber criminals have conducted a large-scale campaign to influence Google results, pushing malware-spreading sites higher on the list and dropping legitimate results to the bottom.
|
