Guest Post: Microsoft Security Essentials Command Line Tip

The is a guest post courtesy of Matt Burian an IT Consultan, you can find out more about him over at www.burianit.com.


Something I found while trying to find a way to update MicrosoftSecurity Essentials automatically on my home testing domain. Some command line parameters for working with MSE:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/updating-microsoft-security-essentials-using-command-line/

Especially useful is this line:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Security Essentials\MpCmdRun.exe" -SignatureUpdate

This is used to update the MSE definition files. I have automatic windows updatesdisabled on my client machines, so I push this command in a login
script via group policy, and know that my definition files are up to date on all machines every time a user logs in.

Obviously, this is just for my personal windows domain, and would not be appropriate for a real business or enterprise environment as MSE is designed for homeuse, and provides no management features.

However this could still be useful if you wish to disable windows automatic updates, and still update your MSE definitions, either on a network, or just a local machine by running this command at startup of the machine.