Small Business Defense – Anti-Malware (yes, again)

Microsoft recently released their Security Essentials product. This is a free anti-malware product, and analysts seem to think that it does a pretty good job at what it does.

However, I want to point out one thing that you probably already know: You get what you pay for.

Security Essentials is intended to be a lightweight anti-malware solution that competes against other free AV solutions. It does a decent job at protecting against the average threat and is certainly better than using nothing at all. However, it is a mistake to compare it to a professional anti-malware system. As SANS says, “Think of this as the AV as it used to be in 2000 or so.”

In short, if you are a home user and don’t care enough about your system to spent $50 a year to protect it, go ahead and use Security Essentials. However, if you are in a business environment, you need something that includes firewall, behavioral detection, network access control, data loss prevention and central management (and more). Security Essentials won’t cut it.

Lastly, if you do decide that you want to try it out, be sure you download the right thing. There are search engine optimization attempts going on to make malicious software (fake antivirus) appear on the search results instead of the link you really want. The right link is http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/.