Microsoft To Bring Its Defender Antivirus Software To iOS and Android (cnet.com) 35
Microsoft said today it plans to bring its antivirus software, Defender Advanced Threat Protection, to phones and other devices running Apple's iOS and Google's Android. From a report: The software, also called Defender ATP, is already available on Windows and MacOS. It offers features like preventive protection, post-breach detection and automated investigation and response, according to Microsoft. When it comes to mobile devices, Microsoft's Rob Lefferts said that the Defender software could help companies protect employees from things like malware and phishing attacks. Apple's and Google's app stores are "pretty safe," Lefferts said, but "malware does happen on those platforms."
Wrong issue (Score:1)
Stop doing that. Defender ATP will not help you stop doing that. This is "protection" that is just maintaining privacy sell-off business as usual.
Re:Wrong issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody said anything about viruses, it's not 1983 anymore and they aren't the primary concern. This is about malware - noticing early patterns of malware, alerting, easily getting the word out to mitigate and uninstall sooner, etc...
For all the tin-foil hattedness of the "OMG my data!!" brigade, it has very little impact on your actual life. Nobody gives a shit. People do give a shit about e.g. some dude controlling their phone camera at will, stealing their credit card numbers, or encrypting their data and extorting them for the key.
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It may be the equivalent of Xi Jinping deciding what to do with your information, what to selectively negatively "summarize" you as, or to augment totally made up things with a mix of actual thoroughly-known fact.
Comfortable with that? There's much worse than Trump out there, and in a future you don't know. Data is forever.
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"? If they also give me ad suggestions which help Google pay for hosting that video, where is the harm that?"
You've now wasted time watching video you wouldn't otherwise have watched, and (over time) bought stuff you wouldn't otherwise have bought.
Odds are that left to your own devices, you would have spent that time on something else instead of seeking out those videos, and spent that money on something else instead of seeking out those products.
There's definitely both an opportunity cost, and real cost. A
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If Gmail is getting off on my data, I think I deserve at least the decency of a reach-around.
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And you're a complete fool if you think having every detail of your life can't be "summarized" to destroy you personally or for political office. Verification of the veracity of the "summary of you" is what people don't give a shit about. They'll just hire someone else or vote for someone else based on 5-second consideration of the selective smear you are permanently signing up to be perpetually vulnerable to.
Totalitarian
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Anti-malware, so will it shut down Windows anal probe 10 anal probing. Will it block unapproved by the end user software installs, will it kill bandwidth stealing telemetry or is it another M$ backdoor like it's operating system. Yeah, you can not sell privacy and security when you fucking invade privacy and security. Super lame marketing trying to pretend to be Apple and selling privacy.
This is about PR=B$ fucking empty marketing, just fucking stop with the bullshit telemetry and forced software installs,
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Nobody said anything about viruses, it's not 1983 anymore and they aren't the primary concern. This is about malware - noticing early patterns of malware, alerting, easily getting the word out to mitigate and uninstall sooner, etc...
Buried deep in TFA links is the MS Blog. There also is zero mention of "Malware". MS appears to have changed nomenclature moving forward and everything is now referred to as a "threat". The MS Blog mentions "threat" 24 times...
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'People do give a shit about ...etc'
If those people are stupid enough to grant the 'app' permissions, I guess they would be stupid enough to trust Microsoft to protect them.
There will always be grapes in the world.
Snake oil (Score:2)
Let me be blunt: most if not all AVs for Android/iOS are snake oil. No, they are often even worse, they eat your smartphone battery, they require your attention, many (if not all) of them collect data about you and send it to their parent companies.
Steps to keep your Android phone safe:
1. Have a device which is regularly updated (some old unsupported smartphones can be upgraded to LineageOS)
2. Do not enable the option "Install Unknown Apps" for any of your apps - check if it's enabled and disable it
3.
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The way Android/iOS work apps cannot get access to low-level kernel functions which is what's really necessary to keep malware at bay. And if your app is just a normal app, its AV abilities will be absolutely limited.
OK, Android for some strange reasons allows an app without any permissions to get full access to other apps disk code (APK) but Android will not allow any user app to access other apps memory, system apps/applications/services memory, system partition data, boot partitions, and everything els
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Let me be blunt: most if not all AVs for Android/iOS are snake oil.
Android needs something to protect you from all the malware crap in the play store. It's not only trivial to get an infection but takes less than a few minutes to do it without trying.
My first experience with Android was a nexus tablet a friend talked me into trying.
After buying it and getting back to friends house, he asked if he could run PassMark benchmarking on it to compare to his phone.
This happened to be on the same week that a fake PassMark app in the store was ranked up by millions (bots no doubt)
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3. Keep the number of wireless networking interfaces to a bare minimum, and enable them only when they are strictly necessary (e.g. NFC/Bluetooth/WiFi). It's worth disabling Bluetooth discovery as well.
This is good advice. Wifi on mobile devices chews through battery just sending out AYT (Are You There) packets looking for networks that you've previously connected to.
On Android devices that support it you can go to Settings > Wifi > Saved Networks and delete all those coffee shop networks you haven't connected to in years.
On iOS? Unless things have changed lately you're shit out of luck. iOS Settings doesn't show you saved networks unless they're currently in range, so there's no way to clean up you
Frankly I think it's Phenomenal (Score:2)
Re: Frankly I think it's Phenomenal (Score:2)
There's zero evidence it can work for other platforms (as far as I can tell)
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I'm not sure it really works considering that it updates its definitions once per 24 hours. There are thousands of new viruses written for Windows every day which means daily updates leave your PC wide open to too many attacks.
Most commercial AV vendors push updates every 60 minutes if not more often.
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Most commercial AV vendors push updates every 60 minutes if not more often.
BULLSHIT. besides virus protection is not the main benefit here, it is malware, behaviour monitoring, intrusion detection, investigation and tracing.
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Yes, it works. We've tested it extensively and compared it to half a dozen other products (I work in a company that does anti-malware as its primary business).
It works. But it's crap compared to almost everything else. We see lots of companies switching to it because money - and we're readying the contact info for when they call and cry and need help.
(also, personal note: You'd think that the OS manufacturer could just make their OS less susceptible to malware instead of adding an anti-malware product...)
Let's make our smartphones feel like it's 1990 (Score:1)
Anti-virus isn't really needed anymore as this is not the typical mode used to attack our systems these days. Scanners are typically behind on signatures to scan for so they aren't really effective anyway.
Phishing attack prevention means the app is getting URLs you are tapping on, and who knows who is seeing/tracking your URLs. There are too many bad URLs to have as a list on the device, and new ones are created all the time.
As for malware, sandboxing should prevent most of that, and mobile operating syst
Anti virus software (Score:2)
post-breach detection (Score:2)
The artist formerly known as "too late"
Extend? Heard that before. (Score:1)
Wonder if they'll extend this cover to XP and Vista?
Translation (Score:2)
"The software, also called Defender ATP, is already available on Windows and MacOS. It offers features like preventive protection, post-breach detection and automated investigation and response, according to Microsoft."
TRANSLATION:
"The software, also called Trust-Us FOOL, is already available on Windows and MacOS. It offers features like secretive data mining, false alerts, phoning home, keystroke logging, overflow vulnerabilities, and automated malware and virus installation, according to Microsoft."
as always - wait until version 3 (Score:2)
I work in a company that's full of some of the best anti-malways people in the country. We checked Defender. As with all MS products, wait until version 3. It's not there yet and if you rely on it, you're silly. With MS unlimited money and the fact that they have always had this perverse pleasure of squeezing their partners out of markets, I'm sure they will get there, at least into "good enough" territory. But not in this iteration and not in the next.
And on iOS and Android, platforms they don't own? Yeah,
Defender for iOS / MacOS (Score:1)