Microsoft Security Essentials 2 Released

According to the MSE forum,

"The latest version of Microsoft Security Essentials has some new features and enhancements to better protect your computer from online threats, which includes Windows Firewall Integration and an improved protection engine. It will also offer protection from network based attacks.



To install the latest version of Microsoft Security Essentials, click here and then click Download Now."

By improved protection engine, they mean "heuristic scanning engine"

You can install it over the old version and it will automatically upgrade it.

 

Nice find - thanks!

 

Already updated.
First quick scan took a while... but subsequent scans were quite fast.
Also, people can now limit MSE's utilization of CPU during scans (but I don't think it does anything).


Still, I have to say that I'm happy MSE received an update.
Will be interesting to see how it rates in contrast to others

 

Upgrading manually using the menu in MSE didn't work for me, but downloading the installer .exe from the MSE website and running that successfully upgraded!

 

Has anyone that updated noticed a new startup process called: CRLEventnet

I just noticed it and posted about it here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/541260-unknown-startup-process.html#post6976934

I'm not sure if it's related at all but I'm confused as to what it could be.

 

Is this the one that integrates with internet explorer?

 

You can also click 'Help' and it takes you to the MSE download page.

 

Ummm...for some reason the MSE download page is inaccessible to me using both IE9 and Chrome.

 

Will current MSE users automatically be upgraded or do we have to redownload it again? Nothing stating a whole new version on the website.

Edit: Same experience as MidnightSun, MSE wouldn't update within itself but downloading the update manually worked out good. Now to go download some viruses. D:

 

wow, they're even using the Forefront graphic now as MSE's background.

 

Works for me, so the problem is on your end. Maybe try going directly through clicking "Help" in MSE as olyteddy suggested?

 

that first quick scan wasnt quick at all...

 

It worked a little later. It seems the site may have been down a few minutes.

 

This is the one that integrates with internet explorer right?

 

Never heard of that. Though I think it may work better (i.e., natively) than most with Win 7.

 

The same thing happened on my system.
However, subsequent scans WERE quite quick.

 

only complaint so far is it doesn't auto update anymore, you get the Windows Update pop up again and depending on whatever you have that set at is how it updates.

 

Judging by the information in the Update tab in MSE, mine still auto updates, I believe?

 

Mine also auto-updates.
I don't really experience problems regarding that.

 

So far so good here.

 

Yeah so far so good over here as well.

From my understanding the heuristics engine was overhauled so it can detect far quicker but should theoretically give more false positives.

Overall I am very happy for a free antivirus that doesn't:
Require 1 year activation (Avast)
Personal information for registering (avast/like 1 other)
Doesn't have problematic updates (Antivir, to be fair they have improved this greatly)
Doesn't bother you every fregging second asking you what to do about every single operation (Outpost).

 

ive also noticed that mse 2 now updates its virus/mw database thru windows update. is there a setting to make the program d/l it automatically and not go thru windows update?

 

Version 1 does this as well. Both automatically update, they just give you the option to get it faster through windows update if you are spending time downloading anyway.

I am still using version 1, waiting until Windows Updates pushes out the update to version 2 before upgrading.

 

Ok I was so happy that I found a free replacement for my Mcafee subscription which is warning me it's about to expire on the 4th of next month. I was so irritated at it because just 2 weeks ago when running a scan with mcafee it said there was 0 detections on my new laptop, then thinking back how Malwarbytes most times detects many threats that slipped pass Mcafee, I downloaded Malwarebytes on my new laptop and sure enough it had 2 detections. So now everytime I get the pop up alerting me Mcafee expires soon, I laugh and think to myself big deal, good riddance, because of this thread and installing Microsoft Securtiy Essentials on, this, my older laptop, I was pleasantly surprised it does all the important things Mcafee is supposed to do.

Anyway having this peace of mind for I guess 3 days now with the free MSE on my older laptop, my newer laptop still has Mcafee, I was hoping to just let the subscription run out then install MSE on that, I had an incident. This is what made me nervous now.

The situation was while trying to update drivers on my new laptop which still has Mcafee, I decided I was going to update my drivers for my gaming pad the Nostromo n52te. On the download site there was a firmware update that I downloaded to desktop, and before finding the driver I read on a forum that Belkin the makers of my gamepad didn't have an update for Windows 7 because of an incident with their drivers being infected with viruses, but that the Vista 64bit would still install.

Thinking this must've been an incident that's already been taken care of, because the discussion that I read about the virus, was posted back in 2007, I proceeded to download the firmware update and my oh my Mcafee actually stopped it in it's tracks and warned me if I wanted to proceed with downloading a severe threat. I canceled the download and went on this computer to see if I would get the same warning from MSE. So I went back to the same download page and proceeded to download the file, MSE let it through. No warnings, nothing. With the supposedly infected file now on my desktop. I thought ok Malwarbytes will tell me for sure, and I right clicked on the download and clicked scan with Malwarebytes, to which Malwarebytes said no detection.

I'm confused now. Did Mcafee actually catch an block a virus? Did MSE and Malwarebytes fail on detecting it? Can someone please help because I'm thinking about renewing my subscription of Mcafee now, just because of this one incident. If anyone wants to try and download the firmware to see if you get a positive threat from your Antivirus here's the link and page I downloaded it from.

Belkin : Support : Gaming : Speed Pad : F8GFPC200 : v1000

the driver seemed to be free of threats since on both laptops Mcafee, MSE, and Malwarebytes detected 0 when I scanned it. It's the firmware, that is setting of Mcafee as a threat.

 

I've used all sorts of AV protection programs mostly free and a few pay AV's. I'm going to generalize because the rule of thumb is not 1 single AV will find/detect/remove EVERY virus/hijack/malware. Some AV's are better than others but in general they are pretty much the same.

MSE is very good for most things so is Avast and Avira. While some AV's will detect a problem it doesn't mean it will properly get rid of it. That's why when some on NBR report viruses on their laptops you'll see some members say, try this AV and if that doesn't work try this one. The hope is you'll install an AV that can detect and remove the problem.

Kaspersky is a pay AV that has a good reputation while others love NOD32.

 

thanks for the response, although I'm aware of this, I wanted to know if the firmware download is infact infected with a threat. Again, Mcafee says it is, but MSE and Malwarebytes doesn't say anything, and I trust Malwarebytes more than Mcafee, because it catches things Mcafee doesn't. Maybe someone with another antivirus such as Avira, AVG, Norton Etc. could try and download the file to their desktop and see if their Antivirus catches it.
If anything I'm thinking Mcafee is giving me a false positive.

 

Try submitting the file to VirusTotal - Free Online Virus, Malware and URL Scanner

The webpage will run the file through a large number of antivirus scanners and give you a report of what each one found.

 

Knowing McAfee this is probably what happened:

The incident with the firmware happened back years ago. McAfee decided to list it on their virus definition and never bothered to check if it was safe or not. Congratulations false positive.

It is not the first time I have seen this problem happen. My friend Sean was the one who put me on it first, he ran a few of the official Dallas server for Guild Wars.
He install McAffee on his laptop running 1 of his boot hard drives (2x hard drives). He had 2 copies of the same program, which was a driver for using a touch screen tablet. One was infected, the other as not. Both were programmed by him. The infection was a harmless exploit in Flash which caused flash to crash anytime it was utilized in websites/etc.

He put the infected driver into the McAfee Laptop. The driver installed but before it finished McAfee spotted it, quarantined it, and then deleted it.

He then uninstalled McAfee, and manually remove remnants of the virus he programmed. Flash worked properly afterwards.
He then put in the 2nd copy of the driver. This time the clean version. As soon as he plugged in the USB it detected the program, and said it was a security threat, quarantined it. Sean of course instructed McAfee not to do anything/added it to the the permissions list. Ran the driver. Worked perfectly, no flash issues yet McAfee did a false positive.
Sure enough as soon as he lifted the program out of the permissions list, McAfee went at it again.

 

Thanks for the heads up.

 

Hello everyone. I've been using MSE since about December, and I have noticed on 1 netbook (Fujitsu PH520, Windows 7) that scanning takes several hours (more than 6 hours) when doing full scan; it also does not scan on schedule (I have set it to scan every Saturday morning at 4am). It is a new netbook, and does not have any other security software. I also have a new Sony Laptop (VPCEB, Windows 7) with MSE and is also not scanning as scheduled. Our XP Pro and Vista desktops are scanning as scheduled.
My questions are:
1. Is it normal that a full scan takes that long?
2. How do I tweak it to scan on the set schedule? I have read somewhere about adding it on Task Scheduler, but I could not find the instructions.
Thanks in advance.

 

guess google translator failed ...

 

I recently switched back to Avira personal edition (Free) after a long time with MSE. I think the switch was for the better....I noticed that sometimes, after a cold boot, MSE would start scanning (even without being told to do so) and bog down the system. Avira behaves properly.

 

You know it is possible to adjust the scanning schedule manually.

 

Cisco Clean Access Agent still doesn't support MSE 2.0. Kind of annoying having to deal with throttled internet access at my Uni.

 

If you can use XP mode you can run a compatible AV with the access agent through XP mode, and surf normally, that's what I do. I tend to run all my junk applications through the virtual machine

 

Ah! The power of virtual machines. The ability to bypass stupid enforced software. You could use XP mode to run the access agent and then share the XP mode virtual network adapter with your host OS adapter. It would technically be an enclosed loop with an entrance and an exit. Don't remember off of the top of my head how to do it, but I remember doing this to run an open source enterprise level firewall.

 

Besides installing all the software you'd need (the access agent and some freeware AV that works with it), there's not much to configure... that I remember. You might have to set the VM to use the actual network adapter you're using to connect and disabled the shared networking, but that's really about it, I've had it work both ways at times.