1. Microsoft Antivirus For Windows Server 2012 R2
2. Free Antivirus For Windows Server 2012 R2
3. Best Antivirus For Windows Server

Anti Virus protection in RDS sessions under server 2012 R2 Standard Hi Guys We are building a server that will run two 2012 R2 standard servers as VM's under ESXi 5.5 Hypervisor. Recommended antivirus exclusions for Hyper-V hosts. All versions Windows Server 2016 Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard. Hi, We need to make a decision whether Windows Defender will be sufficient as an antivirus for Windows Server 2012 R2. The applications running on the server as well as data has high security requirement and will also be subjected to independent audit from certain security certification authority.

Listen to our recorded analyst webinar with ESG on preparing for Windows Server 2003 End of Life. Listen now.

If you’re like thousands of other organizations in North America, you’ll currently be running Windows Server 2003. In fact, your business probably relies on it. But when Microsoft withdraws support for the platform on July 14, all bets are off as to the potential impact on your mission critical systems. At the very least, we can expect the black hats to research new exploits and target corporate users of the platform with renewed vigor.

It is advisable for all firms to migrate to a newer version eventually, but for those that can’t do so by the July deadline, Trend Micro Deep Security is here to protect your organization and keep critical systems running smoothly. As you plan for migration to newer platforms and environments such as Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft Azure, Trend Micro can help you secure your legacy Windows 2003 environment – and after you’ve migrated to a newer platform, we can secure that environment as well. Trend Micro Deep Security will continue to provide support and protection for Windows 2003 beyond the July 14, 2015 end of life date, and we’ll enable you to secure your existing and new servers in a single platform.

Threats multiply

If the last few months have taught us anything, it’s that IT teams must keep up-to-date with the latest versions of whatever software they’re running. High-profile vulnerabilities like Shellshock, Heartbleed and FREAK have the potential to severely undermine corporate security efforts and put sensitive data at risk. The problem for those organizations that stay on Windows Server 2003 after July 14 is that Microsoft will no longer release security updates to protect their systems from such vulnerabilities.

But you can be sure the bad guys will still be looking for such flaws to exploit. In fact, they’ll redouble their efforts in anticipation that companies will be left exposed after the Server 2003 end of support (EOS) deadline.

Not for everyone

Customized support from Microsoft for ongoing patches is possible, but it’s also expensive and unsustainable in the long-term. It’s also not a good idea to run software for which patches will never again be made available. If you think Windows Server 2003 gets a lot of attention from malware writers at the moment, imagine what it’ll be like post-July.

The smart money is therefore on migrating to a newer version of the product. But realistically, this isn’t going to be possible for everyone. There are an estimated 300,000 servers in North America that are simply too old to run newer versions of Windows Server. Other organizations are running mission-critical legacy apps that can’t be upgraded onto newer systems, while others still are simply not able to absorb the cost and resource-intensive migration process as of yet. But if you’ve chosen to stay with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for whatever reason, help is at hand.

Trend Micro to the rescue

Trend Micro Deep Security will continue to provide support for Windows Server 2003 after the end of life date until at least the end of 2017, the same way we have provided protection for Windows Server 2000 and Windows XP ever since Microsoft discontinued support for those platforms.

This should give your organization enough breathing room to plan properly for migration to Windows Server 2012, Azure or other platforms, while protecting you from all major threats to critical systems. Deep Security inspects packets entering the system before they are delivered to an application or processed by the network stack. This will give you an opportunity to look at traffic and virtually patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

Deep Security offers:

Virtual patching via intrusion detection and prevention to shield vulnerabilities before they can be exploited

Integrity monitoring to ensure that any unplanned or malicious changes to Windows 2003 are flagged for inspection

Anti-malware and web reputation to detect malware on servers and strengthen protection against web threats to servers and virtual desktops

Our global threat research team will continue to monitor for vulnerabilities to provide the very best protection for customers – just as we have for XP and Windows 2000 customers before this. What’s more, with Deep Security you get a single product to secure your entire environment, physical, virtual and cloud.

Click here to learn more.

Microsoft Antivirus For Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Defender has been built into Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 by default to provide protection against malware, however there is no such default program installed in the Windows server operating system.

To provide a basic level of security in a small server environment, we can install Microsoft Security Essentials with some simple modifications which contains most of the functionality of Windows Defender for free.

By default if you try to install Microsoft Security Essentials in Windows Server you will receive various errors which we will cover how to fix here.

While it is not possible to directly download Windows Defender to install, we can instead make use of Microsoft Security Essentials which is available as a slightly cut down version for older versions of Windows, such as Windows 7, in order to help protect against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Microsoft Security Essentials provides most of the protection methods that Windows Defender does with the exception of rootkit and bootkit protections.

It is important to note that Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to provide a basic level of free protection for home or small business PCs rather than important server infrastructure. Despite this, users with a very small amount of Windows server installations have been looking for ways to install Windows Defender in order to provide at least a basic level of security.

While this is not officially supported, it does provide an increased level of security that is better than nothing, however it’s recommended that you look into using a proper product that is fit for purpose such as Microsoft’s System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) which is an enterprise antimalware solution. SCEP does require paid licensing to work, so for a very small environment Microsoft Security Essentials can at least provide a basic level of security protection.

Free Antivirus For Windows Server 2012 R2

Although installing Microsoft Security Essentials in a server operating system is not officially supported, it does work and correctly detects threats, as we’ll see here in our example.

Microsoft Security Essentials Installation Guide For Windows Server

Download and Install

1. Firstly you’ll want to download Microsoft Security Essentials onto your Windows server. Select the language of your choice and either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on the architecture your server operating system is using.
2. Save the mseinstall.exe file somewhere locally on the server, do not simply run it as by default the installation will fail with the following error:
3. To get around this error message, right click the mseinstall.exe file and select properties.
4. From the properties window, select the compatibility tab. Within the compatibility tab tick “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” under Compatibility Mode and select Windows 7 from the drop down box, as shown.

   Click OK to continue.




5. If you were to run the mseinstall.exe file at this point, you would receive a different error as shown below:

   In order to resolve this, run command prompt as administrator and enter the folder where the mseinstall.exe file is located. Run the mseinstall.exe file with the /disableoslimit flag on the end as shown below.

6. The installation wizard should now correctly open and Microsoft Security Essentials can now be installed and will proceed without the previous error messages, click Next to continue and work through the installation wizard.
7. Once the installation has completed you can optionally update and perform a scan, this is recommended as the definitions database needs to be kept up to date to find newer threats. An Internet connection will be required to download any available definition updates through the application, however these can also come through from Windows updates so if you have a WSUS server you can update from here as well. After updating a quick scan will take place.

   You can select the Settings tab to modify when the weekly automatic scheduled scan takes place, by default a quick scan is set to run every Sunday at 2am and will not use more than 50% of the available CPU resources.

Testing

8. Now that Microsoft Security Essentials has been successfully installed, we will test the actual functionality of the program to ensure that it will correctly identify a threat. To do this we will create a test EICARs file and see if the real-time protection automatically detects and quarantines it.

   Essentially we are just going to open Notepad and create a .txt file containing the test string defined on that page and then save it to the desktop. Copy crack file into install directory.

9. Shortly after saving the file we have been visually alerted that malware has been detected and that Microsoft Security Client is taking action to clean the detected malware.

   If we check the History tab of Microsoft Security Essentials we can then see the test file listed as a quarantined item, confirming that it is working correctly as intended in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Summary

Although not officially supported, we have successfully installed Microsoft Security Essentials (a cut down Windows Defender) in Windows Server 2012 R2 and confirmed that it is working correctly and detecting security threats.

Best Antivirus For Windows Server

This is better than the default level of security, which is none as Windows Defender is only built into Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 client operating systems, however it is recommended that server operating systems make use of enterprise solutions such as System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) or some other option available from some security vendor.