In one of Alan Shimmel's recent posts to his excellent The Ashimmy Blog, "Do you really need desktop AV anymore?" he states that surfing in safe neighborhoods and practicing safe computing (or safe-hex, as one of his readers posted in the comments section) can provide adequate protection. He is wrong. There are no safe neighborhoods on the internet.  Millions of legitimate web pages are hijacked every year and used to distribute malware. In the past we have seen newspapers, government sites, even the FBI’s home page hijacked – sometimes the networks serving ads to those and thousand of other legitimate sites have been taken over. Worse, malware or links to infected sites are often distributed through sources of trust such as...

Today Microsoft introduced Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.  4 years after Symantec they finally introduced Integration with Configuration Manager, Vulnerability Shielding and Firewall Management – the equivalents of which have all been in Symantec Endpoint Protection for the past 4 years.   

The new version of Forefront still lacks functions we consider essential to endpoint security, including:

• Device control
• Application inventory or application control (outside of AppLocker)
• Access control self enforcement
• Mac & Linux support – only a promise that sometime next year “details on the timing of the Mac/Linux release will be available”
• Optimizations for virtual environments - no resource leveling – no way to prevent av storms in virtual environments
• Bootable recovery disk or a tool equivalent to Symantec’s Power Erasure

A few additional thoughts:...