It appears that today is anti-malware-day on kkomp.com: So I’ve written a bonus article, because I really do recommend that you use this free software: -

As you may or may not know, I’ve been plagued with viruses over the last few days. Fortunately the infection has now been dealt with; thanks to Microsoft Security Essentials. When I became infected, my antivirus solution provided by Avast! simply didn’t see it. Malwarebytes was oblivious to it also. – Yet there was definitely an infection, as my system was spewing out spam emails to all on my contacts-list, as well as to non-existent addresses that the worm was probing by creating the address itself and seeing if the mail was delivered.

AdAware from Lavasoft managed to find a keylogger, a backdoor Trojan, and the worm itself. I thought that the problem was sorted at that point, and went merrily on my way singing joyfully and blogging crazily. The following day I activated my email client, then switched on the 64-bit box, as well as the external hard-drive. My email inbox was soon swamped by hundreds of “Message Undeliverable” emails. The worm was back!

How? I cleaned both boxes with AdAware, I formatted the external hard-drive, including all the backups, and made a fresh backup. Nevertheless I did it all again, and the system stopped sending spam. I ran 4 different programs on all drives of both machines. All reported that the system was clean. Imagine my horror when two days later the system started sending spam again!

I’d recently been reading an article on PC Mech.com, entitled “Free Anti-Virus From Microsoft Is Now Available”. This gave me an idea: Microsoft earlier dropped its Windows One-Care program, and promised to replace it with something a bit lighter. This was the promised product; just out of beta.

My thinking started to run along the lines of: “Well it’s a new antivirus solution, it’s from Microsoft, it works with Windows 7 64-bit as well as with Windows XP 32-bit; both of which I run, and it’s best of all FREE, which means that it won’t hurt to give it a try. – There’s definitely a problem somewhere on my system that everything I’ve tried so far is missing; so let’s give it a whirl.”

I isolated the box running XP 32-bit, removed Avast! free-edition from it, and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I set it to auto scan in 1/2-hour . To cut a long story short it found 4 pieces of malware, which it rated as a severe threat, and removed them. Upon reconnection; after I’d isolated the Windows 7 box, having installed Microsoft Security Essential on it, no spam. Yay!

I ran it on the 64-bit Windows 7 box. – It found the culprits: Two instances of Trojan downloaders: ASX.Winmad.AN, and ASX.Winmad.CJ. It deleted the infected files, which had been downloading various malware infections and distributing them over my LAN. – Target neutralised: I’m now virus free.

I can’t speak too highly of Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s a glowingly-excellent piece of software from the softies. Microsoft Security Essentials was the only free antivirus solution that was able to both see and clear the entire virus-infection and fully clean my system. Most other solutions couldn’t see any infection at all, and those that did didn’t get to the root of the issue. Microsoft Security Essentials, however, did the business and completely solved the problem.

After that glowing report, let’s get back to reality with the nitty-gritty: -

Microsoft Security Essentials is extremely thorough: On its default setting it scans everything, and I mean everything. It looks inside zipped archives; personal, program, and system archives, byte by byte: .CAB files and the like are no longer safe places for malware to hide. If it does then it will die by being detected and eradicated bit-by-bit.

Being so thorough; there are obviously limiting factors.

The first of these is time: Microsoft Security Essentials is fast; there’s no doubt about that, but it does so much work that it’s no faster than any other antivirus solution of a similar type. I found that on my box running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 3-core AMD Phenom CPU running at 2.3GHz and 8GBs DDR2 800MHz RAM, Microsoft Security Essentials managed to scan about 50 GBs of data an hour.

The second is heat: With such a colossal amount of calculations being processed at a quite incredible speed, the processor would have a lot of work to do, and therefore produce heat. This antivirus solution, running a full scan, is no laughing matter. I have a feeling that a single-cored processor of 1.8GHz or less would have problems with it. Indeed, from personal experience, I had a lot of programs running at the same time as the full-scan was happening on my AMD Athlon 64×2-powered box, running 32-bit XP Professional at 2.3GHz with 2GBs DDR2 667MHz RAM, and the processor usage went so high for so long that the thermal-trip shut the CPU down before it fried. Running Microsoft Security Essentials on its own caused no such problem though, and the scan was slower than on the 3-core Phenom, but totally effective nevertheless.

As you’ll see from the white CPU-usage graph in the top-left corner of the picture of the readout from Glint system monitor, above, the processor usage can be quite large. This readout was from the Athlon 64×2 XP box with only Microsoft Security Essentials running.

One other thing: If you’re running 64-bit XP; and that’s probably not a lot of you, as 64-bit XP can be a nightmare as far as drivers are concerned, there’s no version of Microsoft Security Essentials for your operating system. Microsoft Security Essentials has versions for 32-bit XP, 32-bit Vista and Windows 7, and 64-bit Vista and Windows 7.

Have you tried out Microsoft Security Essentials yet? If so then what do you think of it?