Microsoft on Tuesday released a beta version of its new free anti-virus offering, Microsoft Security Essentials (a.k.a "Morro"). The program is said to be fast, easy to use and unobtrusive new addition to the stable of free anti-virus options available today.
MSE is basically the next generation of Microsoft’s Windows Live Onecare anti-virus and anti-spyware service, but without all of the extras, such as a firewall, data backup solution or PC performance tuning (Microsoft announced in Nov. 2008 that it would stop selling Onecare through its retail channels at the end of June 2009).
The toughest part is always getting the program installed. MSE can run on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), but reports from users say it failed to install on an XP Pro system leaving the user with nothing more than a failure message and cryptic error code that doesn’t turn up anything in an online search.
Fortunately, it installs without issue on a Windows 7 Beta system. Interested users should note that installing MSE requires that the would-be user’s system passes Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, which checks to make sure it is being installed on a licensed version of Windows. Would-be users also will need to register for or already have a free Windows Live (or Hotmail) account in order to download the program.
After installation, MSE spends a couple of minutes downloading additional files, and then prompts the user to perform a "Quick Scan." True to its name, that scan takes less than 10 minutes on a test system. A full scan, however, took about 45 minutes on a relatively new install of Windows 7.
Anti-virus products are notorious for sucking up system resources, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting this program is even running. It barely used more than 4 MB of system memory for the entire time I tested it, including during scans.
By default, MSE scans archived files (.zip, e.g.), and creates a system restore point before deleting any files that set off alarms. The one scanning option not checked by default is to scan removable drives — such as USB drives — for viruses. But users can enable this option.
The program is not just an on-demand scanner: It includes -time protection, which Microsoft says "alerts you when viruses, spyware and other potentially unwanted software attempts to install itself or run on your computer."
In addition, MSE monitors file and program activity on your computer, and automatically scans all downloaded files and attachments. If it finds something, it will ask you what to do with the suspect file, and if the user takes no action after 10 minutes, Microsoft will decide what to do with the file(s) according to its default actions. Out of the box, it schedules a scan every Sunday at 2:00 a.m., but only if the PC is idle at that time.
A great deal has been written so far about the potential for MSE to unseat established giants in the anti-virus industry. It’s too soon to say whether that will happen, or how Microsoft’s new offering will measure up in tests against real-life malicious software, tests that are beyond the scope of this review.
It remains questionable whether MSE will have much of an impact on the anti-virus market as a whole. If anti-virus industry players fall by the wayside in the coming years, it will be because they either get gobbled up by their (non-Microsoft) competitors, or they fail to adapt to the latest threats.
Each time the issue of Microsoft throwing its weight around in the security space arises, it invariably raises the same issues of trust, privacy and efficacy. Below are a few of the common themes, in the context of MSE:
Microsoft made the operating system, so it’s probably best equipped to produce software capable of defending its weaknesses: The truth is, Microsoft is continually defending the weaknesses in Windows. Every month, it ships new patches to fix security and stability problems in its software that it didn’t know about until bad guys or researchers unearthed them and proved they were exploitable. What’s more, Microsoft is in no more advantageous a position vis-a-vis other anti-virus makers to tell which tricks the bad guys will pull out of their hats next.
Microsoft is responsible for the same buggy software that lets the bad guys break in, so why would you trust them to also do a good job defending your PC against malware?: This is a fair question, but the folks asking this very question probably will never install this software anyway.
