14 DAY TRIAL // After Microsoft Security Essentials, a new free security solution from the Redmond company is apparently enjoying its fair share of success.
Microsoft Safety Scanner was downloaded in excess of 420,000 times in the first week after launch, some 60,000 downloads per day, the software giant revealed.
Of course, download statistics are less relevant in terms of actual success compared to figures describing actual usage. But Scott Wu and Joe Faulhaber, from MMPC, made sure to provide those to:
“During the first seven days of the MSS release, there were close to 420,000 downloads, or 60,000 downloads per day, of the product. It cleaned 20,097 infected computers in total, for users that suspected their computers were infected and downloaded MSS to scan their machines. Kudos to these users for having security awareness.”
Microsoft Safety Scanner is designed as a very basic security solution. It’s essentially an on-demand malware scanner which hunts down malicious code in concert with any other existing antivirus products.
The tool doesn’t offer real-time protection, but it’s available to users to run scans for malware whenever they have any suspicions that their Windows machines might be infected.
“Among the detections, 7 of the top 10 threats are files containing exploits for Java vulnerabilities such as CVE-2008-5353, CVE-2010-0094, CVE-2010-0840 and CVE-2009-3867,” Faulhaber said.
“Of course many of these detections by MSS are the debris or aftermath after the exploit has already executed. By the time a user downloads and runs MSS to detect malware, the machine may have already been infected, if it was vulnerable to the exploit at the time.”
The Redmond company revealed that it’s very pleased with reaction to the Microsoft Safety Scanner, and that the results have been positive thus far.
It’s important to note that customers that opt to use Microsoft Safety Scanner Security more than once need to also download it again and again, since the tool expires after 10 days.
“We recently updated the Microsoft Safety Scanner - a just-in-time, free cleanup tool. The new version adds support for 64-bit Windows systems and also allows for the download of the tool to run in non-networked systems such as those behind an air-gap network, those within an ISPs walled garden, and those where the infection has impaired internet connectivity,” Faulhaber added.
Microsoft Security Essentials hit the 30 million downloads mark in late 2010, but the software giant has offered no additional updates about its progress since, not even after the release of MSE 2.0.
Microsoft Safety Scanner is available for download from Softpedia via this link.