Windows Defender Is Becoming the Powerful Antivirus That Windows 10 Needs

It's the same thing that happens every time this question is asked. Everyone has a differing opinion on it. The best way to make money from an article is to create an article that doesn't have one answer.

 

A total lie makes perfect clickbait!

Awful comparison. In this case, paying for a helmet that has a chance to give you brain damage just by wearing it, due to having a flawed design (insecure, bad security practice).

 

I just love it when a writer/blogger pretends to be dumber then he really is, because he is trying to disguise a paid advertisement as an article.

The moment a writer/blogger does that, are the moment in time from where you can no longer take anything that person writes seriously anymore. They effectively destroyed their own credibility.

Had Larry Seltzer spent two minutes with a calculator in his hand while he looked at the test results he refers to, he would have noticed that Windows Defender blocked 99,541% of everything malicious in the test.
How he can claim that to be far from perfect remains a mystery. Perhaps he lives in a parallel universe, where you can detect more than 100% ??

His remarks about HIPS and behavior monitoring are a smokescreen.
MSE has been behavior monitoring since early days back on Vista and now with Windows 10 this has been increased twentyfold compared to WIN8.1. In Windows 10 the entire OS monitors for malicious/suspicious behavior and feed that directly to Windows Defender.

His mentioning of network traffic scanning being a commercial third-party exclusive are ridiculous.
This has been implemented in MSE since MSE reached version 2.0 in 2010 and have been a part of MSE ever since Windows Vista. Not available in Windows Defender on Windows 8.0, but fully functional and implemented in Windows Defender in Win8.1 and Windows 10.

If Larry Seltzer had spent less time looking at the paycheck he received from BitDefender, he could instead had done some research and thereby not made a complete fool of himself.

And while we're at it - the badly hidden threat from Bogdan Botezatu against Microsoft made me laugh so hard that I nearly broke a rib.

For twenty years has the third-party AV industry tried and tried and what have they shown us ??
The third-party AV industry has shown us that they have close to zero coding skills, because their pathetic AVs break more in the OS then malware would ever do.

The forensic divisions in the third-party AV companies has some extremely talented people here and there.
But the third-party AV coding divisions ought to be shut down and banned from ever writing publicly available code ever again.

So when Bogdan Botezatu brings forward his bile against Microsoft, he sounds like a three year old that has just been told that there will be no more ice cream.

With Windows 10, Microsoft has shown that it is possible to build native security that will keep system perfectly safe AND keep the OS fully functional at the same time.

Nothing of interest from this fear mongering third-party propaganda brought forward by ZDNet.

 

I don't agree that the answer is there when the quote starts with an "...I'm not sure..." It does lead you in a direction but it is not a solid choice. Looks like we're focusing on opposite ends of that statement. In any case it does not change my view, so I guess it doesn't matter to me. I just feel he asked a divisive question as bait. Then there is the "a solution that everyone agrees is inferior" part which is obviously untrue, hence this thread.

 

LOL

 

https://www.av-test.org/en/antiviru...system-center-endpoint-protection-4.8-154674/

Edit:
The calculations are not mine, they are copy/paste from the link above........

 

My oh my, what a mess you have gotten yourself into, @anon.
But not to worry. It's Tuesday and I'm in a good mood, so let me take you by the hand and lead you out of the wilderness.

Apparently we need to repeat Math101.

The calculations for Windows Defender November/December 2015 Home user are :

140*0,025=3,5=4
140*0,1=14
14658*0,004=58,6=59
14658*0,004=58,6=59

4+14+59+59=136
140+140+14658+14658=29596

136/29596=0,00459*100=0,459
100-0,459=99,541

So during these two months Windows Defender Home User blocked 99,541% of everything that they threw at it.



Larry Seltzer links to the enterprise test instead, where Windows Defender blocked exactly the same except for ONE file less.

But lets run it through the calculator anyway :

The calculations for Windows Defender November/December 2015 Enterprise user are :

140*0,037=5,18=5
140*0,1=14
14658*0,004=58,6=59
14658*0,004=58,6=59

5+14+59+59=137
140+140+14658+14658=29596

137/29596=0,00463*100=0,463
100-0,463=99,537

So during these two months Windows Defender Enterprise blocked 99,537% of everything that they threw at it.

 

Hi Martin,

For the slower members of class, can you please explain what 140 star 0,025 =3,5=4 means?

 

@ Martin_C,
Can you please stop quoting my post?

Thank you in advance.

 

Granted 28k old samples...even if they had 50% both months for zero-days, the score would be still very high....why one shouldn't fudge math. They divided zero-days and olds for a reason--they're weighted.

 

Dave, if I may, it's just translating a block percentage into number of non-blocked samples.

Nothing fancy.

 

@anon :

Please stop spamming the MSE/Windows Defender threads, and I will have no reason to quote you.

Thank you in advance.

Your only reason to show up in MSE/Windows Defender threads are because you like to irritate users in these threads who are always having calm and friendly discussions until you show up.

Therefore it's a bit weird for you to ask not to be quoted in these threads

 

Nothing old about the samples.
As test says - widespread and prevalent samples in those four weeks. Meaning those are actually hitting end users right in those weeks.
A huge portion of the zero day labeled will be so short-lived that you must be very lucky to encounter them.

 

140 times 0.025 equals 3.5 round to 4

 

I realize in some areas of they world the use a comma, they are wrong. Use the decimal point correctly.

The comma is for breaking up large numbers, e.g. 100,000 is one hundred thousand.

 

Some countries use decimal commas and some countries use decimal points as decimal separator.

To argue that big parts of the world are doing it wrong, just because someone happens to live in a country that uses a different method then others are silly.

What about inches and centimeters ??

Are the also countries that are using the "wrong" measurement unit ??

 

Perhaps, but last I checked this was an English speaking forum. The same way you cannot have multiple full stops in one sentence, you cannot have them in maths. Similarly, you can have as many commas as you want in a sentence, as well as maths. In fact, even in countries where the comma is used as the decimal point they speak languages where a full stop can only be used once in a sentence, and a comma as much as they want. You could debate this endlessly, but logic and consistency would have you use the period as a decimal place. Ideally we would all be using the floating point "·" however, that is also not a comma.

Most countries that don't correctly embrace the metric system as the primary system at least embrace it as a secondary system, displaying both as needed. In this regard, metric is a more appropriate global system. Unfortunately the logistics behind changing a measurement system can mean it will take decades to do so, if ever.

 

@elapsed :
You need to broaden you view and accept that different countries uses different decimal separators.

You say 100,000 is one hundred thousand. And everybody else are wrong.

Incorrect. Where YOU live 100,000 is one hundred thousand.

The part of the world where I live 100,000 is one hundred with three decimals of zero each.
And the part of the world where I live writes one hundred thousand 100.000
And with decimals that is written 100.000,00

Next you say that there can't be multiple points but only multiple commas in math.
Again you forget that this depends where in the world you are.
In the part of the world where I'm located, it's the other way around.
One hundred million are in this part of the world written 100.000.000
And with decimals that is 100.000.000,00

We can argue this back and forth all night long, but you need to accept that there are tiny differences around the world.
I have traveled around large parts of the world and if such tiny details can confuse a person then they will find it difficult meeting other cultures.

Dare I mention to you how many different ways the calendar dates are written around the world ?
Yet people show up correctly to meetings, no matter if they have just traveled half way around the world.

Anyway, I believe the thread title was "Windows Defender" and not "Different cultures and their use of decimal separators".

 

Ah! Thanks.

 

...and with a tiny bit of luck, he could have stumbled across a guy called Martin_C that he could have interviewed instead in order to receive much more neutral answers.

 

Not to go way of scope though, but speaking of other countries interpretation of the decimal system. Some places also use "." as multiplication.

ie 9.5=45
or 9.5=45,000 with three decimal places.

What a world...

 

Does he have to stumble across me ?
I might spill coffee all over myself.

He pretends to ask a question and then "accidently" have one vendor describe themselves as a gift from above while at the same time ridiculing another vendor.

It's just advertisement.

I hope no one believes that he wasn't paid very well by BitDefender for his little story. That would be naive.

Of course it's not something new to see these kind of things. Not just in IT, it's everywhere. But every time there's a person here or there who thinks that the articles must be true, because "hey, it's on the internet. It must be true".

Tomorrow another vendor does the same sleazy trick to a third and/or a fourth vendor.

 

What I do is use any free version of the best-ranked programs, and preferably the one with no nag screens, etc.

 

I would take a "baseline" AV (even if it does not have great zero-day protection) in conjunction with a relatively secure browser over any other AV that purports itself as an all-in-one solution that installs unnecessary modules (so-called secure browsers that are actually insecure), installs crap extensions and inject insecure code into modern browsers.

That few percentage point difference is not worth it at all if you take the bigger picture into account. Time to look at security as beyond detection rates only.

With 99.5% detection rate (as Martin_C has kindly calculated for us), as a home user there's little incentive to even look at other offerings other than performance (if it slows down your system too much).

 

In my frustration with other products I actually gave Windows Defender another spin last week. Any time I was not touching the keyboard or mouse it was scanning. And this was my laptop, so every time it would start scanning the fan would throttle up to 100%. Quite annoying and probably hard on the machine.