Microsoft’s “Security Essentials” anti-malware service will be freely available to consumers starting today, Tuesday Sept 29th. Security Essentials is designed to protect consumers from viruses, spyware, and malicious software and will be freely available at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/. The software doesn’t require any registration, trials, or renewals.

Features of Security Essentials include:

• Runs in the background alerting users only when action needs to be taken
• First Microsoft security product to use the company’s new Dynamic Signature Service which makes sure consumers stay updated with the most current virus definitions without having to wait for the next scheduled download
• Limited CPU utilization and memory usage

Security Essentials will be available for Windows XP SP2 or SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 including Windows XP mode on both x32 and x64 systems.

[Check it out]

[Download Security Essentials]

Technorati Tags: Microsof Security Essentials, Anti-virus software

Yahoo and McAfee have teamed up to try and make the web just a wee bit safer to peruse. The online portal will use McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology to label potentially “unsafe Web sites” that might appear within Yahoo’s search results as “risky web sites.” Things that might make a website “risky” include sites that host malware, virus infected downloads, links to other websites that have similar content, or have a track record of harvesting e-mail addresses for spam purposes. The McAfee/Yahoo partnership is a multi-year deal which could lead to McAfee technology being used in other Yahoo products such as Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Mail currently uses Norton Anti-virus software protection to scan e-mail attachments etc. Yahoo is also actively removing web sites from its search index that are identified as using “drive-by-download” attacks. These are attacks that are launched simply by visiting a website. You can read more about what Yahoo and McAffee are doing on this News.com article (as well as what Google is doing to protect search users).

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, McAfee, Anti-Virus