Back on September 28th Microsoft announced the availability of a new free antivirus and antispam software tool, Microsoft Security Essentials, which extends the Microsoft product portfolio in a clever way.

In this article I will share my thought and personally first hand user experiences on the Microsoft Security Essentials software, which I can compare to previous used Eset NOD32 Antivirus and Windows Live OneCare software.

However let’s start with congratulating Microsoft with an impressive milestone of 1.5 million downloads of Microsoft Security Essentials in the first week:

“Now that Microsoft Security Essentials is generally available to consumers in 19 countries, we’ve had a chance to go over the data, and there are some very interesting results. Just in the first week we saw well over 1.5 million downloads of Microsoft Security Essentials, but the price (free to Windows users) is hard to beat! ”

Microsoft Security Essentials product overview

With such an impressive milestone it is certainly worth while to have a detailed step-by-step overview of the Microsoft Security Essentials application and its capabilities. As already mentioned in the introduction, I have some good references to benchmark the functionality and usability of Microsoft Security Essentials, so let’s start quickly with the application overview.

You can download your copy of Microsoft Security Essentials from the download page, and as mentioned by Joe Faulhaber, from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, it is available in different languages and for different Windows Operating Systems:

“Microsoft Security Essentials is available in 8 languages and 19 markets at RTM, which covers a lot of the PC using world. The geographic distribution of detections so far still closely follows the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta countries, and is ramping up in other countries that use the 8 languages.”

This installation is pretty straight forward, but the video below gives you an idea of the installation process and the application itself:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPh09bapmCQ

The graphical user interface (GUI) of Microsoft Security Essentials is simple in concept, and makes it therefore easy to use. There are only 4 tabs within the Microsoft Security Essentials, which I will discuss one by one with help of some screenshots.

A.  Home tab

At first there is the home tab, which provides a general overview of the application and the status of Microsoft Security Essentials. On the left you can see the the “Real-time protection is on” and the “Virus and spyware definitions are up to date”.

In the left bottom part of the home tab you can find information of the scheduled scans, for example the time of the next scheduled scan and a link to change the schedule.

Furthermore on the right of the home tab there are three options to perform a manual scan with Microsoft Security Essentials:  (1) Quick, (2) Full and (3) Custom. These options probably speak for itself and don’t need much of an explenation.

In addition the status of Microsoft Security Essentials and the “current” risk-level are visualized with a theme (green, orange or red) on different place in the Microsoft Security Essentials application. In the article “Introducing Microsoft Security Essentials” you can read the following part in a note from the Microsoft Security Essentials team:

“Red or yellow means there is something that needs to be done to keep your PC secure. A single click and the PC is back to the green protected state.”

At first in top part of the window you can find the “computer status”, which in the example is shown as protected on a green background. Also the computer screen and the bullets in the home tab are colored green, while the green theme is further extended to the tray icon of Microsoft Security Essentials as well.

More interesting, and part of the main application window (so not tab dependent) is the “Help” and next to it a tiny pull-down-menu. This pull-down-menu has some clever options, like the “about screen” of Microsoft Security Essentials which shows the version numbers of the application and virus- & spyware definitions.

Furthermore there is an option to” upgrade Microsoft Security Essentials” to its latest version, and you can also submit a “sample of malicious software” in order to improve the software as well.

B.  Update tab

The name of the second tab covers its function really well. It simply is the place where you can hit a large update button to download the latest virus and spyware definitions from the Microsoft servers.

The status of the virus- and spyware definitions is shown in the top center of the update tab, while more details about the definitions like the version numbers and the creation date are shown in a listview below.

My experience is that the definitions are updated on a daily basis, and while using Eset NOD32 Antivirus these updates were pushed to your notebook. There is an option to check for the latest definitions before performing a scan, but that is a slightly different concept than a real push.

Another example of update-concept is from avast! Antivirus Home Edition, which downloads and installs the latest definitions at the Windows start-up of your machine, completely automatically.

Despite the fact that this an area for improvement I’m really confident that the Microsoft Security Essentials team is looking at different options. While Microsoft has an excellent mechanism in place for pushmail on Windows Phones, I’m really curious about the improvements in next versions of Microsoft Security Essentials.

C.  History tab

The third tab of this simple and robust GUI is called history, which provides and overview of the latest “detections”. Additional information about the infection is shown: “type of detection”, “alert level”, “date” and the “action taken”.

Despite that in the screenshot above this list is empty you have the option to apply a filter to this list. The three filter options are shown above the detection list, and consist of:  (1) All detected items, (2) Quarantined items and (3) Allowed items.

D.  Settings tab

The last tab in Microsoft Security Essentials is the most interesting one and consists of various settings which can be configured. At first you can configure the details / parameters for a scheduled scan.

In my personal case I have set this to daily at 10:00 in the morning , but more important I’ve marked the option “check for latest virus and spam definitions before running a scheduled scan“. In fact this means that the definitions will be updated on a daily basis. However remark the previous elaboration about definitions “push”.

Furthermore you can set the default actions, when Microsoft Security Essentials detects a possible thread to your computer. But more important is that Microsoft Security Essentials has a real time protection mechanism in place, which can be a little configured as well. Like you can see in the screenshot above “all downloaded files and attachments” are scanned, while also the “file and program activity” is monitored on a real-time basis.

I think this is an essential part of protection. The next three sub-tabs in the settings window are all about exclusions. You can excluded certain files, locations, file types and even processes to be excluded from scanning. Be aware however that this also brings a certain risk. By default these fields are empty and I would recommend that you leave it that way, unless you are a field expert on virus- and spamprotection.

More relevant than the exclusions is the “Advanced” sub-tab which easily lets you configure a little more options. First excellent that “archive files” are also scanned (remark the CAB-extension in the screenshot) which is the first option you can mark.

In addition you can scan removable drives when running a full scan. Although this is a good start I would personally like to see this taken one step further. While nowadays you often plug- and unplug USB flashdrives to your computer, I hope that in a future version the option will become available to perform a quick scan on insertion of the USB flashdrive.

Finally you can set the Microsoft SpyNet membership to basic or to advanced. The descriptions of each option are clearly shown in the screenshot above !

Microsoft Security Essentials data analyzed

Joe Faulhaber, from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, has written an article “Microsoft Security Essentials – Week One“, which shows the (statistical) results of first analysis of Microsoft Security Essentials data. The second part of this article will have a look at the data and first results after an impressive first week.

In the introduction I already mentioned the impressive number of downloads, which was also reported by the Softpedia website. However how many detections are there registered so far?

“Computers reporting detections up to October 6: almost four million detections on 535,752 distinct machines. The detections are eight times the machine count because many computers are infected with multiple threats.”

Furthermore the article of Joe Faulhaber, from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center provides a more statistical analysis with the top virus-, worm- and other malware-families. In addition the geographical location is also included in the analysis as well as the operating system.

The bottom line is that Windows 7 machines have the least detections, with one of the main reasons is the use of the more robust 64bit variant of the Windows operating system. If you like statistics you should certainly have a look at some of the distributions and the reasoning behind some observed results from the data-analysis.

Wrap-up and conclusions

Mitchell Ashley, Editor on Networkworld, has written an excellent article “Microsoft Security Essentials – Never Pay For Anti-Virus Software Again” in which he touches a few points that are really valuable:

“No frills and a minimum performance impact on your system. MSE may not be the fastest scanner of the AV products, but it has a pretty small footprint on your system.”

Since the release I’m using Microsoft Security Essentials as my primary virus scanner and antispyware software. In this time I can only fully support the findings of Mitchell Ashley. Furthermore I just had a detection when some pop-up loaded in my browser, but this “thread” was directly neutralized. In the article there is furthermore an interesting test from PC World:

“When put against AV-Test’s “WildList” collection of 3,194 recent, common viruses, bots, and worms, Microsoft Security Essentials detected and removed each and every one of the malware samples. How does this compare to other security products? AV-Test coordinator Andreas Marx notes that “several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet.” In addition, Microsoft Security Essentials put up a perfect score with zero false positives–it didn’t flag a single clean file as being malicious. AV-Test also took an initial look at Microsoft Security Essentials’ rootkit detection, testing it against a few rootkit samples, and found “nothing to complain about.”  — Nick Mediati, PC World, 06/25/2009

We don’t need to forget that this still is Microsoft Security Essentials v1.0 and there is expected room for improvement. The most important area for improvement would be the real-time push of virus- and spyware definitions.

Perhaps the Microsoft Security Essentials team could collaborate with the Unified Communications team which worked on pushmail for Windows Phones (very data- and battery-life efficient).

Right clicking on the Microsoft Security Essentials icon just provides the option “Open” now, but this could be extended with the most important commands like “update”, “full scan” “quick scan” in a kind of quick menu.

I have also installed Microsoft Security Essentials on my HP Mini 1000 netbook which has a 10.1″ screen in a 1024×600 resolution. My final point of feedback is that the standard height of the Microsoft Security Essentials Window on tha HP Mini 1000 equals or even exceeds the height of the HP Mini 1000 screen, and resizing vertically is not possible.

Concluding

If you add up the extreme simple,  robust user interface  and free price point to the minimum performance impact, small footprint and accurate detection you can clearly see that Microsoft developed a no-nonsense anti virus & -spyware application. I think it is an excellent addition to the overall Microsoft product portfolio, and you can’t go wrong with this application !!

SBSH is a settled software company for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60. Applications like PocketBreeze, PocketWeather, iLauncher and GoNews Touch are among the best sold software titles for the Windows Mobile platform.

SafeWallet is their first application for the iPhone. In this article I will give a complete review of the software team: SafeWallet 1.1 for the iPhone and SafeWallet PC Companion 1.2 on the PC. In this review I will try to find out if SafeWallet can be as successful as other SBSH titles are for Windows Mobile.

SafeWallet on the iPhone

When the application is started for the first time you have to make a new wallet. Give the wallet a name, enter a password for the wallet and confirm the password. After this is done the wallet is created and there are two default folders created: Business and Personal.

The Plus icon gives an option to add a new entry which can be a new Folder or a New Card. When creating a new card there are 24 templates to choose from. Among them are “Bank Account”, “Credit Card”, “ID Card” and “Serial Number”.

These templates are sufficient for the average user. But the users who need more card templates can create them by themselves using the PC Companion Software on which I’ll come back later in this review.

When creating a new card this card can be filled in. If needed there is an option to add one or more properties to every card. These properties can be a string, Numeric, Date, Time, Date and Time, Upper Case, Password, Web Address, Email, Phone Number or Note.

So imagine when adding a website – the default website template gives you the possibility to add the URL, Login, Password and Note. By adding a new property from the type “Web Address” it is possible to add for example the Admin URL, or you could add database connection settings in Notes.

When the Wallet is open and the iPhone is put into sleep mode the Wallet will automatically be locked in order to secure the data inside the wallet.

The SafeWallet interface is in my opinion very clean and clear. There are not too many buttons on the screen and the buttons which are displayed are always self-explained. I’ve used a test wallet with over 100 cards in different folders and luckily there were no speed issues. The only thing I really missed on the iPhone interface was an option to search cards within the Wallet.

SafeWallet on the PC

When starting the PC Companion interface the last opened Wallet will be re-opened after entering the password. The menu-bar has the same style as the Office 2007 interface. Below I will go through the most important functionalities of the PC Companion interface

The Home tab

The “Home” tab shows from left to right the buttons:

• Create a new wallet
• Create a new Folder
• Create a new Card
• Create a new Template (This option is grayed-out when Wallets is selected on the left screen)
• Edit a Card/Folder
• Cut a Card/Folder
• Copy a Card/Folder
• Paste a Card/Folder
• Delete a Card/Folder
• The possibility to change the view of the main screen
• Edit how the cards should be shown. (Small Icons, Large Icons, Details)
• Search for a Card
• Start the Password Generator
• Start the Sync Manager

Most buttons are self-explained but some buttons might need some more explanation.

Delete

The Delete button obviously deletes cards and folders. When deleting a card or folder you get a confirmation question if you really want to delete the selected Card or Folder. What I didn’t like is when you delete a folder it is not mentioned that all the cards within this folder are also deleted. This delete is (from what I could see) permanent and cannot be reversed.

Include Cards

When this button is deactivated the main sceen looks like this:

Notice there are 2 sections in the mainscreen.

• The left section of the screen shows all the Folders and Cards within this Wallet
• The right section shows the details of the selected card or folder.

When the “Include Cards” button is activated the screen changes to:

On this view the main screen shows 3 different sections.

• The left section shows all the folders within the wallet.
• The middle section shows all the cards within the selected folder on the left .
• The right section shows the card details of the selected card in the middle section.

Search

The PC version of SafeWallet luckily does include a Search function. Search can be done on every property in the cards, even in the password property. A folder will not be returned in the search-results.

The standard search is good for skipping from one card to another card. The advanced search gives a list of all the cards where the search-query is returned. One of the cards can then be double clicked and this card is opened in the main screen.
Personally I think the advanced search results give a far better overview than the standard search.

Password Generator

The included Password generator is a very handy tool to create new passwords. The password generator can be started from the “Home” tab, but also from every property in a card which is marked as a password for direct access.

The password generator has all the options I could imagine someone would like to have in a password generator. There are options to include upper case letter, lower case letters, numbers and special characters (You can even specify which special characters).

There is an option to select how long the generated password should be (2-32 characters) and you can even select a way how the password should be generated (this can be set to “Randomized” or “Advanced”).

When the button “Generate” is pushed the generator generates a password and gives an indication how strong the password is (this can be “Very Low”, “Low”, “Medium”, “High” or “Very High”). Obviously the longer and more complex the generated password, the strength gets higher.

The Tools tab

The “Tools” tab has 3 buttons: Settings, Import and Export

• The Settings button gives the possibility to edit the application Settings.
• The importing tool can import cards from various wallet applications like DataVault, eWallet, FlexWallet and others.
• Exporting can be done to an XML or a text file.

The Help tab

The Help Tab has 2 buttons:

• One button shows SafeWallet’s “About” where the version can be viewed and to who the product is registered.
• The Support button opens the SafeWallet Support website. So there needs to be an internet connection to view the produtcs’ support.

Templates

SafeWallet lets you create your own Templates if you think the standard templates are not sufficient. The self-created templates are named “Custom Templates”.

When a custom template is created a new card from this template can be created on exactly the same way as the standard templates.

What I liked very much on templates is that not only the cards based on this template, but also the custom templates are synchronized with the iPhone Wallets. So when you’ve created a custom template, you can create a card from this template directly on your iPhone.

Synchonizing Wallets

The Home tab contains one more button which needs some special attention: the Sync Manager button.

Of course you would like to synchronize your wallets from your iPhone and your PC. When you enter a card on your iPhone it should be available on your PC too. SBSH did a very gerat job by enabling synchronization over Wifi. First of all make sure both devices are connected to the same WiFi network, this is essential for the synchronization process.
Open SafeWallet on the iPhone, go to the tab “tools” and push “Sync Mode” You should see the following screen:

Now go to the Sync Manager on your PC and click the button Synchronize. At this moment the synchronization process should start.

The iPhone application will come up with a popup that the Syncing is completed; there is no confirmation on the PC.

Thoughts and Conclusions

I think SBSH proved that they are able to create applications for the iPhone which are at least as good as we know them from the Windows Mobile platform.

A point of improvement in the SafeWallet software is “cloud-synchronization”. Sadly there is no solution for synching your wallet with an FTP-server, File-server or anything similar. Competitive software solutions often are able to synchronize in the cloud.

In my opinion the PC Companion version of SBSH SafeWallet is a full grown application. All the functions are created very well and the application feels stable and mature.The only thing I can comment on the PC Companion software is a lack of a confirmation message when the synchronization is successful. The iPhone version is also very good, but misses a few features which I think should be available. The most important missing feature is a search. When having hundreds of cards it is not very easy to quickly find that specific card you need at that moment. I hope this is a feature that will be available in a later version.

Both the iPhone and the PC version are great applications, but when these two applications are used together you really have a killer solution. Having your wallet with you all the time on the iPhone, creating new card templates on the PC, creating passwords with the password generator: it all works fawlessly.

Pricing and availability

SafeWallet can be purchased from the iPhone App Store at a price of $5,99 and the PC Companion can be purchased from the SBSH Website for $5,95.
If you would like to try the PC Companion then I would suggest the Trial version which can be downloaded from the SBSH Website.