What is the Malware Information Initiative (MII)?

After installing G DATA Management Server, you will be asked if you want to participate in our Malware Information Initiative (MII).

In the Administrator, you will find a corresponding check mark under the module Client Settings, submenu General. Here you can grant or withdraw your participation by setting or removing the checkmark (per computer).

But what exactly is the MII?

G DATA’s virus experts are constantly researching new methods to protect G DATA customers from malware (viruses, worms and malicious programs). The more information is available on this, the more effectively protective mechanisms can be developed. In particular, the statistical evaluation of data following an active virus alert can help make proactive procedures such as BEAST or the anti-ransomware module more effective and minimize false alarms.

For some protection components, it is necessary for data to be transferred in order to provide the function. For example, checking URLs in the Anti-Phishing or Web Protection modules is technically not possible at all without the request to our web servers. However, we always design the settings in our products in such a way that a user can change our default settings. In this case, however, the protection function would then be completely omitted - just as it would be if phishing protection were turned off in the browser. However, a lot of information is not necessary for the local protection components to function. For these cases, we have created the Malware Information Initiative. Users can object to extended data transmission by deactivating MII, so that we no longer transmit executable malware files from user computers to G DATA, nor do we transmit any data potentially related to users of computers.

You can find more detailed information about the data collected by G DATA on our detailed information page about telemetry data (only available in German for now).

Participation is voluntary. By participating, you help ensure that all G DATA customers can use the Internet more securely!