Microsoft has just released Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0.

If you don’t already run some form of anti-malware suite, then I strongly encourage you to Download Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 today!

The release of MSE 2.0 brings many improvements in the accuracy and performance of malware detection and removal, better integrates with Windows Firewall, adds protection from a variety of network–based attacks and integrates with Internet Explorer to better protect users from browser-based malware.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is an anti-virus and anti-malware product that Microsoft first released in September 2009 to replace Microsoft “OneCare”.

MSE surprised many when it was released because it was everything that the majority of commercial 3rd party products were not: MSE is free for consumers and small business’, it is small, fast, effective and unobtrusive.

Over the last year, MSE has dramatically grown in popularity and has been updated regularly with improvements that have catapulted it to the top of may comparative reviews. In October 2009, AV-Test.org conducted a series of trails on the officially released version, in which:

“Microsoft Security Essentials detected and caught 98.44 percent of 545,034 computer viruses, computer worms and software Trojan horses as well as 90.95 percent of 14,222 spyware and adware samples. It also detected and eliminated all 25 tested rootkits. Microsoft Security Essentials generated no false-positive at all.

Since MSE uses the same malware scanning engine as Microsoft’s enterprise-class “Forefront” security suite, malware detection and eradication techniques for businesses benefit the consumer MSE product and vice-versa.

Even if you’re already using a 3rd party commercial anti-malware suite, I strongly encourage you to examine MSE – in my experience, it rarely hampers performance and sits quietly in the background, only notifying you when it finds something you REALLY need to know about. If only more anti-malware suites were more like this!