MSE / Defender are lightweight and definitely the way to go. IMO avoid Norton/McAfee or honesty anything else for personal use. Windows users really don't need to think about it anymore.
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Apple Updates OS X Anti-Malware Definitions to Block 'Yontoo' Adware
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MSE / Defender are lightweight and definitely the way to go. IMO avoid Norton/McAfee or honesty anything else for personal use. Windows users really don't need to think about it anymore.
Unfortunately, that's still not true in my experience. With a Mac you can pretty much avoid bad stuff, but on Windows it's way too easy to pick up a rootkit without installing anything or being 'tricked' in any way whatsoever. Not even Norton protects from all of it, but it still does a better job than any of the 'free' applications.
why do you refer to MSE / Defender (made by microsoft) as 'Free' ? I hope you think of xprotect (maintained by apple) in the same way. I don't know what to tell you... you must do strange activities on your windows machines. I'd like to see this 'rootkit' that just silently penetrates into your well maintained machine.
Yeah. Rootkits. There are none of those out in the wild, since a coder would have to have access to windows source code to create them. I can only think of one rootkit that's been released on the public, and that was by Sony as part of some really incredibly over the line DRM scheme.
That'd be Norton's definition of it, so yeah. Maybe they jumped the shark? I don't know. Just generally speaking, it's still pretty easy to get an infection on Windows, even if it's just some sort of spyware.
I'm also not dissing MSE because it's free. Just it's effectiveness compared to the paid Windows suites. I haven't encountered anything that's as effective on Windows. I would peg this on there being way too many threats in the wild for anyone to keep up with without investing a huge amount of money into the infrastructure to do so. At that point, it's hard to offer it for free.
It seems that way statistically, but how often do people who are at least halfway computer literate catch something these days? Yeah, there's about a billion and one bugs floating around out there ready to infect your machine, but really only about 4 or 5 are ever dangerous to an up to date machine. Like that one guy said above, a little common sense is about all it takes to not get infected. Throw up an ad blocker, set flash to enable on demand, don't download weird crap, and keep a scanner running for those just in case moments. That's about all it takes to keep your computer clean.
Its been a bit since I've read the reports, but MSE is much better than just decent enough. Last I checked, it's about on par with Nortons while being considerably lighter on resources and not nearly as annoying, but not quite as good as Kaspersky's. That's more than enough for me.
It is in the background, which has caused some users real problems. Recently one of these background updates disabled Java and users were not able to access various banking and work related sites.
IMO Apple really needs to change this so the user knows when an update like this has disabled functionality of the computer. Many users wasted a lot of time trying to find out what was wrong with their computer only to learn Apple had killed the Java web plugin.
No, it is downloaded and installed in the background. It is a plist file at the below location that gets updated. You don't need to install anything, and unless one manually checks the date of the plist, you will not even know you have been updated.
The plist list is at:
Code:
/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plistThe updates can be disabled in this pane in System Prefs.
Here is a link that shows the contents of the latest security update.
The two are interrelated. For example, recently Apple used the xprotect update to shut down the Java web plugin due to a security flaw. Then a security update was released that fixed the Java flaw, and xprotect was then updated again to allow the Java plugin to be used.
So two different processes, but they are related.
Sorry, I haven't a clue. I don't keep up with MS Windows security. Maybe another more Windows knowledgeable member can pop in here.