Microsoft Security Essentials- Is it good enough?

Rita is concerned about Microsoft Security Essentials
This is taken from one of the newsletters I receive and I was wondering if you were still advocating using Security Essentials or had changed to some other anti-virus. I know you no longer tell people to use Avast and I wondered why. I find no problems with the free version of it. Yes, you have to register it but there is nothing demanding you buy their full version. Could you please tell me what you suggest now?

Below is the headline from C/Net.

(Security Essentials fails latest AV-Test. Microsoft’s free antivirus suite did not pass the most recent efficacy test by AV-Test.org — the only one out of 24 suites tested to not earn certification.)

I was just wanted your opinion now that this has come out. I have subscribed to your newsletter for years and have all of your e-books. I have been saved a lot of times by the info you furnish to me and everyone. You do a great job in helping all of us and you are appreciated more than you know.

Thank you for your time.

Rita

Our answer
Nothing brings readers like scandals and bad news for a major player. CNet and others like to tabloid-ize their articles to attract more readers and earn more money. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with leaving out facts and details, like CNet and others did.

First of all, AVAST and AVG have been at times, decertified. We’re not fans of either, but we didn’t write sensationalistic articles denigrating these two antivirus programs. We know how these independent labs work. And we know why sometimes good anti-virus programs fail.

First of all, MSE did quite well when pitted against real, in the wild, viruses. Its poor rating came from the heuristics side, detecting new, obscure viruses most of us will never see. There’s a sunny side to this — AVG and AVAST suffer from the crying wolf syndrome — i.e. warning users of viruses where there are none (false positives), whereas MSE has one of the lowest false-positive detection rates of any anti-virus program; and that is a good thing.

Other independent labs still certify MSE and so do we. If people are going to switch anti-virus programs every time an independent testing lab says it didn’t pass this test or that, then those people are going to be changing anti-virus programs often.

We’re sure that Microsoft is aware of their heuristics scanning issue — but we hope they don’t ramp it up to the point where they start the crying wolf syndrome and start popping numerous false-positives like AVAST and AVG seem to do.

This isn’t the first time something we’ve recommended has shown poor test results. Of course, Norton and McAfee have too. Test results ebb and flow — go up and down – and that’s normal. We’ve thought about not recommending any anti-virus at all except to tell you what we use on our own computers.

We use Microsoft Security Essentials on all our computers and we will continue to do so until something changes our minds. And it won’t be one single independent lab in Germany that changes our minds.

We continue to recommend MSE and we continue to use it and to advise our family members and friends to use it. What you decide is up to you. But we’re warning you, next time a test result comes out it may well show that the antivirus you just replaced MSE with is the very one that didn’t pass that month’s tests.

MSE failed to perform well in the world of the esoteric, but in real world protection it was near the top.