Google Chrome Engineer Says Windows Defender 'the Only Well Behaved Antivirus', Cites 'Tons of Empirical Data' (onmsft.com) 231
Days after former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan said that antivirus security suites are not necessary, and AV vendors are of little help. A Google Chrome engineer has echoed the same message, reaffirming that Microsoft's built-in software is indeed the most well-behaved security suite. From a report: Apparently the disdain for 3rd party AV solutions runs deep amongst browser developers, as in response to the threads a Google engineer, Justin Schuh, had this to say: "Browser makers don't complain about Microsoft Defender because we have tons of empirical data showing that it's the only well behaved AV."
I'd agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to agree. I used to have third party anti-virus on the wife's machine and the kids' machine, but really the most effective malware prevention is to take away root/admin privileges altogether. Anti-virus doesn't protect against the stupidity of users. If they install malware, no anti-virus will stop them. Almost everything that the anti-virus software caught was benign and were false alarms. And despite being useless, the crap software was a resource hog.
I have since uninstalled anti-virus. I will do an occasional malware bytes scan, but have done so less and less frequently as I find little but tracking cookies.
So, yes, I agree with this report.
Re:I'd agree (Score:5, Informative)
Same here, to be honest. AVG became unusable due to bloat a couple of years ago. Avast can have some serious issues when presented with a combination of Windows 10 with Anniversary Update and a Skylake CPU. The remainder all seem to be as bad as much of the malware they ostensibly protect you from.
I confess I spent a while feeling paranoid after I finally gave in and uninstalled Avast, but a few months on, I've had no problems with a combination of Windows Defender and a weekly Malwarebytes scan.
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Same here, to be honest. AVG became unusable due to bloat a couple of years ago. Avast can have some serious issues when presented with a combination of Windows 10 with Anniversary Update and a Skylake CPU. The remainder all seem to be as bad as much of the malware they ostensibly protect you from.
I confess I spent a while feeling paranoid after I finally gave in and uninstalled Avast, but a few months on, I've had no problems with a combination of Windows Defender and a weekly Malwarebytes scan.
I've had no problem with Avast, Win 10, and the i5 Skylake on my Surface Pro 4. Not saying that there isn't one, just that I haven't experienced it.
My current security setup for all of my computers is Avast, Spybot S&D, and Spybot Anti-Beacon. The primary reason why I run Avast vs Defender is because Avast scans email on arrival and when sending and seems to have a bit more advanced protection. Defender only scans email when you open an attachment. One of these days, maybe my next computer, I'll dro
Re: I'd agree (Score:2)
Now if only Windows Defender would stop flagging useful tools like KMSpico and Daz's loader as malware.
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'Start-up's should be ring-fenced tightly, if this is done the all it would take is a re-boot to de-fang a virus.
A program that doesn't start is harmless.
Re: I'd agree (Score:5, Interesting)
Doing nothing is an improvement over many third-party antivirus products. Remember the fun Norton bug last year, where they had a buffer overflow in their image parser that meant that someone sending you an email with an image attachment (even if you never opened the attachment) could run arbitrary code with kernel privilege? Quite why they thought that the part of their program that parses and inspects data that's expected to be malicious should run with kernel privilege instead of in a deprivileged sandbox was never revealed. I don't want to particularly pick on Norton here - most of the other vendors have had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that leave you worse off than if you didn't bother with their products at all.
Add to that, most antivirus products still use system-call interposition mechanisms that have been shown to be trivial to bypass for a decade (we used to set it as an exercise for undergrads).
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My mother keeps getting viruses. She'll click on anything and everything as she has difficulty being paranoid online. Her antivirus DOES detect viruses.
If it interferes with the operation of the browser then that's perfectly fine with me.
Re:I'd agree (Score:5, Funny)
I do this too. I also have a folder on Google Drive called "Viruses" for exactly the same purpose. It's been getting pretty full lately; I feel a little like Egon with his neighborhood-sized twinkie.
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Fuck, I thought I was the only one doing this. I must have around 1GB of auto-generated or carefully-saved malware (and a few MS-DOS virii) in my GMail account.
It just goes to show how stupid even those with "IT Expertise" can really be.
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Except that I do see the 10% happening. Sure the smart viruses will get past it, but there are countless old viruses still making he round and my relatives keep finding them. You may as well say that locking the front door is 90% placebo, but you'd be pretty dumb to leave it unlocked all the time because there are attacks of opportunity.
I don't know about that (Score:5, Funny)
I have a friend who's a Windows Defender and he just goes on and on about how great Microsoft's products are. Pretty intrusive if you ask me.
Disable ad-blocker for a paragraph of twitter crap (Score:5, Informative)
I clicked on the link, get a popup asking me to disable my ad-blocker...fine. Done. Turns out the article is about a paragraph and just regurgitates some twitter garbage. Utterly useless site.
Re:Disable ad-blocker for a paragraph of twitter c (Score:5, Insightful)
These engineers forgot the most effective, powerful anti-virus product that is an absolutely essential install; the ad blocker.
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Regardless of anyone's particular sentiments on aPK (he doesn't bother me), black-holing garbage domain names (something something hosts file) and IP addresses (if possible) is an excellent source of additional protection.
Re:Disable ad-blocker for a paragraph of twitter c (Score:5, Informative)
Also, to add to the GP's comment about the importance of an Ad-Blocker, let's not forget blocking auto-run of certain browser plugins and the ability to whitelist sites that can run JavaScript / save cookies.
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You can do the wild cards with a router based DNS server. Though this is not as easy and turnkey as an adblocker.
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Large anything degrades performance. Period. The larger it is, the more resources it uses.
Hosts is garbage in the world of IPv6. Hosts is a piece of insecure shit cobbled together from the late 90s meant to identify computers on a local network with a name instead of IP address, and any serious security person never uses it as it's bypassed by the OS at will (and several programs with the right calls) now days anyways.
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Conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that every company other than Microsoft has a built in conflict of interest. The AV software companies profit motives are not aligned with providing a good user experience. A good anti-virus system should be nearly invisible. Hard to convince customers to pony up a lot of money for security software unless you are always in their face and an anti-malware system that does this inherently results a bad product. Worse they have to keep tacking on extra "features" and products to convince customers their product is better than the next guys. Their business model is based on scaring customers so they buy their product based on perceptions rather than actually keeping them safe.
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Symantec tried this about a decade ago. I think it was around 2007 they released a version of Norton Anti-Virus and Internet Security that actually didn't suck too much. It didn't grind the computer to a halt, it didn't nag constantly, it just quietly got on with its job. In one version they went from joint last with McAfee to being one of the best.
It must not have worked very well for them because the next year it started to pop up little messages again telling you that it has protected you from 9.8 billio
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I use NOD AV and the only times i get bugged is when it blocks some bad resource, like a favicon or bad ad. It does not yell when it updates, I does not nag you with new versions. Set and forget and it's been like this for more than 10 years.
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Malwarebytes still gets my thumbs up though. Clean, simple, and effective.
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Excellent comment and I only wish other Microsoft products weren't so well behaved.
You know,
- Being asked to upgrade for "free" to an OS that routinely monitors your actions.
- Then being asked to upgrade to the "Pro" package.
- Getting asked to buy the latest versions of Office.
Is Windows Defender also malware? (Score:2)
Does Windows Defender try to do other things besides defending?
Does Microsoft use Windows Defender as a way of gaining control over a computer?
Microsoft managers have little social ability? (Score:3)
"... the most they [Microsoft managers] want is information on how to be either a middleman or true supplier for the things you want to buy."
That seems correct to me. However, it seems to me that Microsoft managers have little social ability. They can be self-destructive and not detect that they are being self-destructive. One example: In Windows 10, Microsoft tries to sell "APPS" to people who are employees of companies doing routine work.
It seems to me that Microsoft manag
Least effective too (Score:2, Insightful)
It's probably the "best-behaved" because it is one of the least effective anti-virus. It has terrible detection rates compared to its competitors. The other anti-virus programs may be pushier and embed themselves deeper into the host system, but that's necessary in order for them to (try to) root out the infections.
Arguably end-users do not need this sort of protection offered from better AV packages, that Microsoft's product is "good enough" for most users. Certainly, better Antivirus is no panacea; even t
Re:Least effective too (Score:4, Informative)
https://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php
Just to summarize with a few popular AVs
Microsoft: 97% detection rate, 23 false positives
McAfee: 97.9% detection rate, 57 false positives
Kaspersky: 99.8% detection rate, 1 false positives
Avast: 99.6% detection rate, 13 false positives
F-Secure: 99.9% detection rate, 140 false positives
Doesn't look like MS is particularly bad.
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These charts have to be misleading. I'd stake my life that they take 10,000 old known malwares and test against them. Not surprisingly, every vendor detects them. Then they take a dozen or so new malwares, and 2 vendors catch them. Eventually you have the 99.1% vs. 98.9% type results and they all look about equal. They are certainly not equal.
All it takes is one of those new malware threats to bring down your business for a day. If you want a chance at catching them, you go with vendors that do a good job a
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A false positive is not a bad thing. The complaint in the article is not that the antivirus is not effective, but that it "interferes" with some applications. Which does not sound like a problem to me, just a bit more work for the developers.
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Its all about how many viruses that are let through.
Microsoft being 3000% worse then F-Secure is not bad ?
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a 3% leak is a lot more than the 2.1%
That depends entirely on what kinds of things are in the 3% and the 2.1%, as well as how often they are seen in real world usage.
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Windows Defender isn't going to save you if you are the kind of idiot who downloads random crapware. What it will save you from is a variety of exploits and other attempts to screw with your system. File based detection is a losing battle, virus writers are constantly testing their software with the latest definitions and making sure it passes by, and AV software is getting multiple updates a day to try to keep up.
Google and Mozilla have the right idea. Defence in depth. If you rely on just detecting bad fi
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It's probably the "best-behaved" because it is one of the least effective anti-virus.
It works well for the kinds of people that are not engaged in risky computing in the first place. The other kind are not going to be saved by any kind of AV, but are probably a great source of income for you as a support tech.
It is "best behaved" (for whatever that means) because it simply /does less/.
If by "does less," you mean it is not hyperactive and so does not train your users to ignore its alerts then, yes, you are correct. It does less.
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It's probably the "best-behaved" because it is one of the least effective anti-virus. It has terrible detection rates compared to its competitors. The other anti-virus programs may be pushier and embed themselves deeper into the host system, but that's necessary in order for them to (try to) root out the infections.
Half the time the level of embedding IS the infection. I've never had Windows Defender cause an issue with the Offline Files service by locking the temporary files that Office creates when you hit save, resulting in the temporary files staying on the disk and the correct files going missing. I have with Mcafee. You don't get remote code exploits on Windows Defender just by sending someone an email or an RAR file unlike with Norton.
Nothing is quite as attractive than a program that runs with system privilege
As a security guy, I mostly agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I'm getting annoyed with AV packages still not being able to flag things like base-64-encoded Powershell scripts or Office doc VBS scripts that make direct references to system libraries. Almost all the malware that's made it through our defenses in the past six months has used one of these two techniques (plus a little code obfuscation, but still), and none of the AV packages I've tested (via sites that scan against dozens of packages) have ever flagged any of the most effective offenders.
I tend to agree as well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Far too often, antivirus products follow the "cable television" market strategy:
"Yes, we know you already pay us for a subscription, but we can get so much more out of you by forcing you to see all kinds of shit you really don't want, including adverts for all our other services."
And, in the case of free antivirus, this too:
"We can see that you really dont want our full package, otherwise you would have bought it instead of opting for the free version-- but we feel compelled to try to upsell you each and every possible opportunity, and wont relent at all. We will even be really obnoxious with your notification area, and make your system play audio adverts, because that's how much we really want you to have a subscription (but see the prior market strategy-- we wont let up on the ads even if you do!)"
They invest tons of resources (both computational and time-wise) into making needlessly flashy UIs with big colorful buttons, and scary "CSI: Miami"-esque dialogs, when really--- the part that really matters-- how well they can trap execution events without bogging the system down-- seems to get nearly no love, and appears to get shittier and shittier.
Then you have Windows Defender. It's so plain, you instinctively ignore its presence. Excepting on older XP systems, (where there was a CPU utilization bug), it runs with a very modest system footprint. It does not constantly vomit spam into your system tray, and does not try to milk you for additional service agreements, or to switch to a paid version. It behaves itself very well.
If Avast or AVG behaved like that, instead of trying to be garishly tawdry and whorishly self-promoting like prostitutes, and reduced their system resource consumption habbits accordingly, they would win hands down.
But no, fleecing idiots is much more profitable.
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I commented the same way about *four and a half years ago*.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
AV spends too much time and resources on making things look pretty, yet scary, instead of actually doing an effective job.
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Another poster points out above that inconspicuous third-part AV software would not "win hands down", because to the user it appears they've paid for software that doesn't do anything.
I did a complete 180 on AV software (Score:4, Insightful)
I started doing PC support in my Field with Grandmas and small business.
AV software WAS USEFUL in the XP/98 era. I would argue with slashdoters calling them morons for not running it as you had 1 min max before infection on Windows 2000 or XP with no firewall!!L
We all ran admin istrator aka root and Win32 even had account personation services. Gee a dialup with no firewall or shitty software one with IE 6 running Java and Adobe flash without a sandbox on a local admin account was the norm so what could possibly go wrong!!??
Vista god bless it made UAC, privilege speration, scrambled ram addresses with aslr, buffer overflow protected buffers in c/c++, and psuedo local admin accountants which instead used a token to run something. Thanks Theo from OpenBSD for inspiration.
Windows 10 goes further too by using x86 features to separate data from executable bits directly on the CPU and signed bootloaders.
AdBlock and sandboxed Adobe products and AdBlock all make Windows OK now. Not perfect, but OK.
I just reused an Asus sabertooth I threw out in storage 2 years ago . I thought it was broken! Why? Esset kept making my ssds loose data. I thought SATA ports were bad. Went thru 3 expensive ssds. It was my damn AV software glitching them.
Keep updates current, run AdBlock, DNS service like the free Norton DNS servers on your router's, and heaven sakes don't click everything you download and you will be fine in 2017. AV software forges SSL certificates too which is dangerous
Re:I did a complete 180 on AV software (Score:5, Informative)
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That's not true. You can disable the SSL inspection in all of them. Finding the setting may be tricky, but it can be disabled.
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So if I were a cracker I would just forge Norton or McAfee certificate and I can MITM all your freaking data! Hello spearfish from Lenovo all over again and free banking info now since I unencrypted your session to bank of America. That is scary and a big vulnerability. Enterprises get weekly updates. Home users don't
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Account impersonation is still there, even in 64-bit Windows. It's required for how Windows works. If you want to see it, set up a VM, run Metasploit against it (use smb_login) and get a meterpreter shell, load incognito, and list and impersonate tokens to your heart's content.
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Windows10 has SEH handling and it requires work to get around ASLR. It's not impossible but compared to XP it's a big improvement
As an insider, can confirm (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for an AV vendor in their IT department. Others in my family have continued working in the software security industry for decades. They really are just bloated resource suckers with little value. As such, I haven't run anti-virus beyond windows defender for a little over 10 years, not even on my kids computers. They're kept up to date, ads are blocked on my network, and I have taught my kids how to recognize an executable from other kinds of files (thank god for re-enabling file extensions being shown, the stupidest Windows default of them all).
We had one virus when my daughter opened an email that gave her some nasty popups constantly. She learned a valuable lesson that day, but I was able to reverse it in less than an hour booting into safe mode and removing the files. Been fine otherwise.
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I can't imagine it can be a whole lot more efficient than Windows Defender and still do as much. WD is really, really lean, and only checks for the most common malicious code. It's the 90% rule of anti-malware. If others are more efficient, I'd like to know why they thought they could throw out a given check of some kind, but I can't see how the gains would be that much when WD doesn't really do much in the first place (compared to the big dogs like Symantec or Kaspersky).
Sad to say I have no trouble accepting this (Score:2)
After years of pain from the likes of Norton, McCafee, Sophos, Nod32 all of which can make you want to have a virus instead of the antivirus, Windows defender is the only one that hasn't compelled me to rip it out.
I agree! (Score:2)
I think Windows Defender is better than any of the AV out there - and that this signifies that MS has finally found its core competency. It needs to get out of the OS business and stick to AV.
Utter shite (Score:3)
That said, no AV is a poor prospect too, especially for business. I work for a local break-fix shop that also is branching into MSP work for out small to mid biz clients. Out system uses a modified Bitdefender + site blacklisting. It works well but does have a foot print. I say it is useful though because some of our clients are 30-50 seat law firms, insurance companies, and financial institutions - you would not believe how heavily targed they are with social engineer attacks designed to install malware. Mostly through email attachments, but there have been DOS attacks, password attacks against open ports, and DNS redirect attacks.
User training is #1, but AV and good backups have saved the bacon more than once. We see constant removals of crypto virus installers, only 2x in the past 3 years has one actually gotten through by being too new for detection. How many would that be without an AV with a 95%+ catch rate?
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Just a year or so ago it had an 85-89% catch rate
That actually seems really good for AV.
No AV is a panacea. It's just one tool in the toolbox. 85-89% is a really good starting place if you ask me. Add to that DNS blacklisting, ad blocking, content filtering, application whitelisting and sandboxing, you could have near 100%.
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If your clients are specifically targeted, no AV is likely to catch the attacks. AV is there to catch the low-hanging fruit, not the ones coming after you specifically.
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From what I could see in a few different tests windows defender is about 97% and there are a few scanners that go to 99.9% but the higher the detection rate the more likely it also is to suffer from false positives and impact the system negatively while running.
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We recently worked a case where some vertifore software was conflicting in a strange way with the BitDefender engine. It took a bit to get resolved as it was a deep iss
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I have had AV software have false positives on software I was compiling and it would delete it immediately. I even tried to mark that area as safe but to no avail. I ended up getting rid of the AV software since I could not get work done that way.
I have also run into AV software where a bad update went through and the software ended up attacking the OS and did quite a lot of damage in terms of downtime.
At the end of the day it is easier for me to avoid viruses than it is to deal with most AV software I have
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I wrote about the weaknesses of the AV-Comparatives tests here: http://robert.ocallahan.org/20... [ocallahan.org]
Testing against only already-identified malware is bogus. But FWIW, Defender has a 97% catch rate in AV-Comparatives' latest report.
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I switched all my Windows machines to Defender (Score:2)
Use GNU/Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is more to an a/v... (Score:4, Insightful)
...Browser makers don't complain about Microsoft Defender because we have tons of empirical data showing that it's the only well behaved AV....
There is more, a lot more, to an a/v than what is seen via the myopic view of a browser developer.
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Yeah. All those other things that most AV vendors do like forge SSL certificates, behave like rootkits, open your emails before you even click on them (hell even Microsoft stopped this 10 years ago), bypass firewalls and other parts of windows, set themselves up as essentially impossible to remove. ...
Defender is missing all those features.
Sure! It's okay to settle for Defender! (Score:2, Interesting)
As soon as you agree to compensate my clients for lost data when ransomware sneaks in under Defender's nose, maybe I'll pay attention to that brown stuff you're spewing.
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Sorry, but in business, if you care about your data you go belt AND suspenders.
You run a multi-layer backup strategy.
You run antivirus.
You don't use "server" devices as someone's workstation.
Etc, etc.
Sure, your chances, especially with an intelligent, tech-savvy userbase are tiny.
But security is about more than just obvious stuff. And if you can catch corner-cases, so much the better. Less effort and cost for the client in the long run.
The solution is worse than the problem (Score:2)
Anti-virus suites have one huge problem. They are worse than getting a virus. At least a virus tries to hide and not kill your system. AV programs have no such respect for the users.
Definitely agree (Score:3)
I had bitdefender installed on my machine about a year ago and I was writing c++ HPC software. Everything was compiled with the Intel compiler and mkl with profile guided optimizations. Bitdefender started detecting my binaries as virus infected and deleting them. This happened a few times and I disabled it for a month and later turned it back on with newer virus definitions and the same issue kept happening. It even detected some of the binaries I had on a shared drive and deleted them also.
The false positive rate on some of these scanners is just too high.
I will just stay with windows defender since it has not interfered with any of my debugging or profiling and has never deleted the software I am compiling.
It's about internet filtering (Score:2)
Strongly suspect the main reason the browser developers like Microsoft Defender as a "well behaved" AV is because it's purely a file level defence, and so doesn't interfere with the behaviour of the browser. Unlike many third party AVs, that will intercept internet traffic, looking for bad stuff before it hits your browser.
That's good from a browser point of view, because they don't have to deal with browsing problems being caused by the AV engine (for example, without whitelisting, ESET's engine will cause
I agree witht hat (Score:2)
Microsoft Defender most well-behaved security suit (Score:3)
the singular of anecdote (Score:3)
I read the entire thread up to my standard filter level, and this is what I concluded: the singular of anecdote is "one size fits all".
It's pretty clear from what I've read here that for a low-value target, I'd just settle for the low-hanging fruit of Windows Defender, ad blocking, a DNS block list, etc.
It's also pretty clear that for a high value target (e.g. law firm, bank) where the minimum system install is a bulked-out i7 I'd elect to suffer the bloat & obtrusiveness in order to obtain the somewhat better catch rate of a first-tier third-party solution. The people working for these kinds of institutions are pretty demoralised to begin with, it will just look like business as usual (and so it is).
The other side of this is that "one size fits all" is directly connected to the competency porn carapace. "Well, I work for banks and law firms and YOU can't handle the truth". But what actually gets written is this "YOU can't handle compensating my clients for a 48-hour loss of service". This tends to be a person whose amygdala has swollen to such a painfully large size that he or she can no longer multiply 1% times 365 (the constant friction of a badly behaved "solution") and can only multiply 100% times 2 days (as specified under the total availability-loss Weimar Reparations Act).
Someone has obviously not used BitDefender (Score:2)
Someone has obviously not used BitDefender.
Absolutely agree... (Score:2)
I haven't run any virus checker other than the one built-in to Windows for years now. They all catch old or obvious viruses. None of them is going to catch a new, clever virus. There's not a whole lot in the middle. Add in the virus-like behavior of the AV itself, the performance-suck of most of them, and it just doesn't make any sense to use them.
As another poster pointed out: user error is the biggest cause of virus infection. Train your users, use Windows Defender as a sort of "sanity check", make regula
I must confess... (Score:2)
Anecdotal evidence (Score:2)
It seems to work better than any other anti-virus I've used and I hate them all. It's certainly the least annoying.
Well behaved doesn't mean it is good at benchmarks (Score:2)
Antivirus software is a hot topic in IT security right now. Not because you need AV, but because most AV is terribly designed and breaks security in other applications. And while Windows Defender may not score particularly well on canned tests used by AV reviewers, it doesn't break as much software as other AVs do.
Remember that in order to work, AV has to inject itself all over the place in your system to intercept network activity, disk activity, etc. But if it does that at the expense of other security
Not Really Surprised (Score:2)
Most AV software is bloated crap that offers little actual security.
Microsoft has been focusing on power efficiency and battery life, so I'm not surprised if they traded off a little detection capability in order to run smoother.
Antivirus isn't even on the top of the list for avoiding an infection. That would be (1) don't browse as admin, (2) keep software updated, and (3) use an adblocker or filtering proxy.
With the vast majority of malware being drive-by downloaders, a good adblocker or filter offers more
Duh. This has been true for years. (Score:2)
AV software for anyone that has had to use it for any amount of time can easily tell you that Windows Defender is the *only* AV software anyone should be using anymore. Back in the day, there were a number of products out there which I would call good. Now, probably due to increased pressure for more profits, subscriptions, and increased monetization of every aspect of their business I wouldn't want any of them. Not only are they all bloated resource hogs, they cause more problems than viruses they catch. I
Re: MicroShaft (Score:5, Informative)
They're not glorifying effectiveness (though most testing shows they all are pretty equal now) instead they're explaining that Microsoft's solution behaves well with applications which is generally true as it's less invasive.
As a former developer of web browsers (6 years of it), I can confirm that from a developer's point of view, Microsoft hooks more cleanly into the sockets API than the other's I've used.
Don't get your panties in a bunch.
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"As a former developer of web browsers (6 years of it), I can confirm that from a developer's point of view, Microsoft hooks more cleanly into the sockets API than the other's I've used'
As a typical computer user with basic fucking logic, NO DUH Microsoft can more cleanly hook into its own API than others.
Re: MicroShaft (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's a bit more than just "Microsoft unfair advantage". Other AV products have always been monstrously bloated affairs, and have become all the worse over then last decade as they throw all kinds of other shit like firewalls and the like in. Products like mcafee and Norton have become almost as bad as the disease they purport to treat. So far as I can tell, Defender really doesn't do much more than sniff out viruses and malware, and while I agree Microsoft's insider knowledge probably gives it a bit of an edge, I think the narrower intent of the software has a lot to do with its better performance.
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It's nice to have the firewall though. Windows does not have a reasonable alternative. Some other features that AV packages have can be handy when setting up systems for relatives who are clueless about computers, like warning when a site is potential spam, your credit card number is going out in the clear, and so forth. Most malware these days is coming over the web browser so first line of defense should be there, and the AV is just to help catch what gets through.
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> Other AV products have always been monstrously bloated affairs, and have become all the worse over then last decade
Additionally, even decent antivirus tends to bloat over time.
Avira Antivirus and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware both have "web protection" modules that will not stop nagging you if you disable them, for example.
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Nice Fanboi flamebait post. Beau, did MicroShaft PAY you to put this up?
I can back this up based on my end-user servicing experience, and I'm not even a Microsoft fan. Recent versions of Windows before 10 are better protected with Microsoft Security Essentials (free from MS) plus periodic manual scans with MalwareBytes Free than the bloated antivirus scanners that bog down PCs for the first hour after every reboot. In Windows 10, the antivirus is finally built in once again, so long as you enable Windows Defender.
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When I tried out Bit Defender in 2014, it would fill up my RAM, and I'd have to reboot once a day. It's been some time now, since I've used it, and I don't know if they ever got around to fixing that or not.
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BitDefender on OSX is terrible. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for any reason. It often thrashes the CPU, increasing heat, battery usage, and obviously having a massive impact on disk performance on overall system responsiveness. I've never used it on Windows, and likely never will. Windows Defender has always been fine for me on Windows, I've tried McAfee etc in the past, and they've all been much more trouble than they're worth. I can't deal with the massive performance loss, and strange abnormalities
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On OS X, the built-in Xprotect is the only antivirus you need. Watch for 'social engineering' malware installs ("the email I clicked on looked just like it was from the bank, so I entered my machine password when it asked me to") and browser redirects.
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Windows is SO badly full of security holes compared to any other OS that Microsoft HAD to come up with Defender to avoid loosing all credibility.
You misspelled "Android."
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2003 called, it wants its information back.
Windows is very secure, any given set of crap apps you may install on it - not so much.
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>> Windows is very secure,
Sure it is. NOT.
The whole concept of the registry at all is fundamentally insecure, especially one that apps can write mostly anywhere and read nearly everithing.
Windows security model is also fundamentally borked because its a collection of workarounds on workarounds, mostly because backwards compatibility has been a higher priority than security, and Microsofts total control of your PC has a higher priority than anything, including usability.
Even as admin you can't stop it
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All code that is natively run is either explicitly vetted by the chain of trust that starts from the embedded controller (the OS and Chrome itself) or permuted such that it cannot escape a narrowly-defined sandbox (NaCl, Pepper plugins, etc). If you have a Chromebook and you're running ChromeOS, it's even better, as the chain of trust starts from the TPM.
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You presume I'm running Linux? ha.
30 years later and my Amiga still hasn't had a single malwar
+++ CARRIER LOST +++
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What malware authors love most about Linux is your attitude. It prevents you from really looking at your machine.
You managed to devine a lot of what my attitude is from a really short post. You must be psychic.
All Operating Systems have some vulnerabilities. As it turns out Windows has the Lion's share of them.
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It's actually based on GIANT, not RAV. Both were purchased by Microsoft, but the former was used as the launching point for what would become Windows Defender.