Microsoft Security Essentials is now part of Windows Defender

[Jeremy Collake]

Microsoft Security Essentials is now part of Windows Defender

In Windows 8, Microsoft Security Essentials has essentially become Windows Defender. You'll notice when opening Windows Defender that its interface is the familiar Microsoft Security Essentials. So, a free and pretty comprehensive security solution is now built into Windows. I'm not sure how the anti-trust regulators will view this, but it is a win for consumers, as it is free, and generally works quite well. It has the lowest false positive rate in the industry, making it an excellent choice for protecting your PC without causing unwarranted warnings on benign objects. That isn't to say it is perfect, no security software is, but it is fast, free, and reliable.

Of course, you will find other third-party security software having more features as they continue to ramp up to try to compete against a built-in free solution. This is nothing new though, they've all added lots of new features for the last few years. The choice is yours - more features, or basic security. For me, Windows Defender (formerly MSE) offers all the features I need. This may not be true for everyone though, and for the sake of the rest of the security industry, I hope many users continue to use their products.

I do feel it is a dangerous situation if we are all using the same security software, too much consolidation of power. After all, security software these days has the difficult task of not only detecting viruses, but detecting malware - which is essentially deciding whether an application has malicious intentions or not, something that is not always black and white, and can result in litigation.

[Hotrod]

Both have been almost synonymous for quite some time now. On both my XP and Win7X64 installs Microsoft Update recommends you install MSE and when you do you find that WD has been disabled. You check some things out and find that the same process names run in MSE as did in WD. So that tells you the 2 were integrated.

[Jeremy Collake]

True, you are exactly right. However, it is not until now that they replaced the older Windows Defender with the full MSE built-into Windows. So, there was a very distinct change. Before, installing MSE disabled Windows Defender, and it was a separate download. Now, it's there by default.

[BenYeeHua]

Just some remind.
MSE weak with detect the trojans, so if you are playing online games with cheat, be careful about it. 

[Jeremy Collake]

MSE also has the fewest false positives . That is the trade off. Their detection ratio is still very high. I had posted this, but lost it due to about an hour of database loss (told you I had some server nightmares last night). I was securing things and Murphy's Law hit me. My linux virtual machine I accidentally trashed by deleting what I thought was an old snapshot (it wasn't). It had all the database backups, so I had to rely on a backup about an hour old . I would have done an on-demand backup but didn't anticipate troubles. Oh well, we're good now, though I still have work to do.

[Jeremy Collake]

.. and as for Windows Defender, while they did use the same core technology as MSE, in prior builds it was crippled a lot to prevent backlash from the security vendors and anti-trust regulators (I presume). After all, the Security Center will recommend other vendor's security products as well as Microsoft's. MSE was the version with all the features, and had to be manually installed. Now, the 'full' Windows Defender (formerly MSE) is built-in by default. Thus, that's the change, and I imagine some people in the security industry aren't so happy .

[edkiefer]

Yes, while I have read good things in general with MSE , I guess this is going to bring up the old IE wars . MS be a monopoly again for sure there be court battles to come from Antivirus/security companies .

[Jeremy Collake]

Yes, I use MSE (now WD) myself, *but* I am very fearful of a single security product dominating the entire industry. That said, so long as they keep the false positive rate lowest in the industry, they are A-OK with me . Just today I had to deal with 4 false positives by other vendors on old freeware utilities (JCALG1, for instance, and other utilities with full source code even included). The CPU Eater demo for Process Lasso even had a false positive. Although my little community project The False Positive Report (http://falsepositivereport.org) never really took off, I could literally fill it up with my own false positives - which demonstrates very graphically how frustrating these can be.

[BenYeeHua]

Yup, false positive rate is most important for rookie user, as they don't know did that files are malware/virus or not.
They are just screaming on giver/developer and say that your program(that giving) is a virus. lol 
But some anti-virus weak in detect virus downloader, and I have to find which file/bat is downloader for that virus.
I just facing 2 times for it. So it is ok for a rookie user.
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If you are a rookie user, just find a balance between false positive rate, detect rate and also heuristic engine detect rate with your behave.
Heuristic engine is useful for scanning new virus, but with some false positive rate.