Microsoft Security Essentials popped up a warning a couple of days ago about an attachment to an email (see “Gullibility: Bad; Skepticism: Good”–yes it was that email–I received it multiple times). I decided to see how it handled it and told it to simply delete it.
It did. It also deleted ALL the emails in my inbox. Not to worry. First, most of my email is filtered into subordinate boxes and none of that email was touched. Second, I concatenate all my email accounts using GMail to collected from three different email servers, then I download everything from the GMail collection. So, all my email is already “backed up” there. Third, I use Thunderbird Portable and can (and do) back up my email again, weekly, by simply copying the Mail folder from the Thunderbird Portable folder to a more durable medium than the flash drive Thunderbird Portable runs from.
So, no mail was lost.
But, if you don’t have multiple backups and do run into a similar situation, don’t say you weren’t warned. 🙂
So, what you’re saying in essence is that Microsoft Security Essentials is as bad as some of the malware it’s supposed to protect you from?
Why am I not surprised anymore?
Actually, MSSE has only glitched removing things this one time. While it’s not yet found any malware installed on this Win7 install (nor, for that matter have any of the other, backup anti-malware apps), it has found my archived collection of interesting malware (almost all sent to me as email attachments or found on “unsafe” pages Opera warned me about *heh*) and I’ve allowed it to delete some of that in the past with no problems.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong in this case, but I do know I’m going to be more careful with MSSE in the future. I already had it set to simply warn me, not take action on its own, so this one’s half on me, especially since I already knew that malware attachment was there and could have deleted it myself as soon as I saw it–before the warning from MSSE.
Still, this could be disconcerting to folks who don’t maintain data and system backups.
Malicious application found: The Internet
delete? Y/Y
please select “Y” to delete this application or “Y” to delete this application.
*heh* You know, there are a LOT of folks who call me with problems that all they really need to remain trouble free is “Malicious application found: The Internet
delete? Y/Y”
Well, either that or a brain transplant.
We do NOT live in “Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average”. In fact, I seriously doubt half of them are, after seeing what they turn out to be as adults.
That’s seriously depressing in a representative republic tending ever more toward mob rule (democracy), dominated by media mind control. But despair is a deadly sin…
Speaking of Me$$y$oft stuff, though. One lil tip I could give folks that is generally useless to all but folks with some serious reference software (or hardware–or, really, both) is to calibrate their screen by typing dccw in the Start menu in Win7. Sure, it works, but Win7 usually does such a good job recognizing and automagically calibrating modern displays that most folks won’t need it. What’s that have to do with this whole post and where I’ve departed the reservation from the lil “delete the Internet” tangent? Simple: Win7 is the first truly easy-peasy, lemon-squeasy OS from M$ that allows real idiots (even congresscritters, I’d imagine) to use it with virtual transparency. I expect more and more calls from idiots who’ve managed to use something in Win7 to do something monumentally stupid, so I like the OS a lot from that perspective, too. “You break it; pay me money. I like money. Give me more.” *heh*
As for MSSE, well, I’ve had people break things using security apps from darned near every company that makes the stuff, so I wasn’t all that surprised when I let MSSE delete the attachment and it deleted more than I instructed it to delete. It’s why I do backups.
BTW, another rabbit trail: although Win7 has some pretty good backup software (including fairly basic disk imaging) built in, I’ve also put some Windows Easy Transfer files in storage. Heck, it certainly does a great job of backing up all the essentials, and if my system went belly up, rather than use an early image to recover, I might just do a fresh installation and import a recent WET file, as a test of just how well that effects a recovery of data, etc. Yeh, I’d have to reinstall apps, but that’s never a real issue for me. Maybe an hour’s time, and then I’d have those freshly-installed as well. Nice thing about Win7 Pro: the included backup software will back up to network drives, too. Nice. Multiple backups in multiple formats in multiple places: a feeling of security (even though it’s just a medium level security, as only one is offsite in a medium-security level place–my hosted domain/site). Of course, my backup scheduling still leaves some things to be desired, but that’s probably grist for a post.