Windows Defender Is Becoming the Powerful Antivirus That Windows 10 Needs

I use Windows Defender by the way!

 

I already knew it

 

True, i.e. :
With a specific notebook I wanted to use WD but I can't =
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/malwarebytes-standalone-or-w-av.393489/page-2#post-2670601

 

LoL, as I was saying before, MsMpEng will be always be vulnerable, because the way it works by default, no fix can fix that, just patch, patch and patch away, all the time.

 

I can imagine lol, on the other hand the average Joe doesn't even know of AV Comparatives or any other test organizations. I agree with Shadek, the chance of getting infected is really remote unless one is a bloody fool. There is a big alert about cryptolocker malware, but I'm convinced that the bad guys overall are losing the battle...

 

@anon :
To be fair - the netbook you are concerned about are running a Intel Atom N450 with 1 GB ram.

Intel Atom N450 was introduced in Q1 2010 : https://ark.intel.com/products/42503/Intel-Atom-Processor-N450-512K-Cache-1_66-GHz
Intel Atom N450 scores only 297 on CPUBenchmark : http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel Atom N450 @ 1.66GHz&id=618
Intel Atom N450 was slow as a snail even back in 2010 : https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Atom-N450-Notebook-Processor.23722.0.html

It's now 2017.
Today it's practically impossible to buy a smartphone, a smartTV, a bathroom scale or even a wristwatch with such weak CPU performance.
They will all outrun that ancient Atom.

Those Netbooks in general where "the thing" back in 2007-2011 and they where only about ONE thing - cheap, cheap, cheap.
Not performance. Not smooth user experience. Not usability.

The Netbook era ended when tablets arrived, many many years ago.

To be annoyed in 2017 about hardware underperformances from hardware that was already underperforming back when that hardware was introduced in 2010 - that's not really relevant.
No matter what - that ancient Atom CPU will for ever be slower than slow.

 

I have a mini-laptop with Atom A4 and 2gb RAM (around 1.5 left) . It was shipped with Win8, it is a snail... i even tried to put Win7 without any AV , just SRP/anti-exe, still a snail but a slightly faster snail...
the only OS worth installing was Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop) , i guess XP should run fine but no way i will use it.

Those specs are too low for Win10, with WD or not.

 

There is no need for such a long post in order to explain what the above mentioned CPU is (my link to cpubenchmark contains the Intel Atom N450 specifications).

And please, don't read selectively......
=

 

Last time I checked, this forum was mainly text based.
Telepathic members are probably far between.

So being grown up and realistic are forbidden ??
I was simply taking a look at that very underpowered CPU you are still keeping alive.
Relax.
If you are so passionate about that dated Atom, then by all means enjoy it.

 

I thought so.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thr...-windows-10-needs.383448/page-39#post-2684936
>
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/malwarebytes-standalone-or-w-av.393489/page-2#post-2670601
>
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N450+@+1.66GHz&id=618
then=
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/thr...-windows-10-needs.383448/page-39#post-2684949
............

 

sadly that remains MSE's weakness, to me performance overhead is a lot more important than the level of protection. If the overhead is too high then its removed/disabled and of course it then protects against nothing.

I am glad microsoft are taking security more serious but do remain baffled why applocker is not only not enabled on windows 10 consumer windows but on top of that it could be preconfigured as part of defender.

Windows 10 is getting more and more tempting to switch to, but I just cannot condone myself switching to an OS that harvests so much data and has forced automated updates. If I can find a way to use the enterprise version which has most of the downsides negated I may switch. Reinstalling the evaluation version every 6 months is what I am considering at the moment. I dont want to use a pirated version, I have long stopped using illegal copies of software.

 

Regardless of what each of us feels towards WD, the reality is it does work and very well. Better then quite a few. I use it specifically on all my machines now and dont even give it a second thought. If I were a AV vendor, I would start by getting real creative with my product f I honestly wanted to keep being considered by current and future customers.

 

The new winners will be those companies that promote their product as complimentary to WD, and not as a replacement for it.

BTW, always loved your comments. You focused on the GUI and ease of use, which is very important to a noob. Cheers!

 

And if this same progress continues in the manner to which it seems to have been marching ahead so far (completely agree with the above post about integrating AppLocker) it might just become that elusive golden egg M$ is sorely neglected all this time.

I also agree on the overhead. Performance matters just like bandwidth. Who can tolerate net speeds at old fashion 56k dial-up crawl rates in these times? (it happens with ISP's who THROTTLE either at specific times or....)

The same applies to operational machine momentum. This is exactly why I always spent so much time before Defragging often like crazy and working the disk over consistently trying to squeeze out every extra miliseconds possible the O/S would give. Lots of effort but worked very well on previous versions.

 

Microsoft are already one step further ahead.
With Windows 10 S soon to arrive, every user will out-of-the-box be running with Device Guard fully activated and preconfigured.

 

It does, the ones who are doing poorly on the Malware Protection Test without cloud are likely to fail you. I've seen multiple McAfee and Norton protected PCs fail at catching Trojans and PUPs.

 

device guard is not applocker.

 

Never said it was.
I said, Microsoft already went one step further ahead.

 

With all due respect, did you read what I wrote? Any vendor which scores over 96 % (heck, even over 80 % would make it statistically improbable) will render live malware very unlikely to infect your computer. Just do the math. At least in the western hemisphere the math is valid.

The test result doesn't base its result on whether it's cloud based or whatever.

 

Your math appears messed up.
So you think 0.04%*12 = 0.48%, while you really wanted to say 4%*12 = 48% (because you mentioned 96% protection rate)? This is plain wrong.

Now, because the protection rate is basically the same every month, let's say 96%. Then at the end of the year, rate of being affected is still 4%, the same as in a single month. Heck, in reality they do the test every month, but what if they do the test every day? every hour? The probability does not change. You simply cannot multiply the frequency they do this test. Now you see what I'm saying?

 

96% on Real World Protection test, yes I can agree. But the reality is that on-demand scans are still relevant because there is a lot of LAN-based, intranet and USB drive malware floating around. I get a lot of those in my university and I've seen that cloud-dependent products absolutely fail at remediating those situations. Furthermore, if it comes to 0days kind of stuff; again, behavioural analysis reliant on cloud isn't as reliable as behavioural analysis on-system, especially when your internet access is via secure proxy (since that setup will not guarantee internet access for your AV product, and also in many cases updates are "pushed" via centralised machine to all machines with AV product installed on local network). In such cases, it is important to select the product which can work well offline. Everything I've seen points to Norton and McAfee as two failure products in this area and people are much better off using Windows Defender than this crapware.

 

Windows Defender is getting better and better and it's already better than some paid Antivirus. Let's go Microsoft, we don't need all the Antivirus companies out there ...

 

There's only one issue with Windows Defender, and that is that it is also dependent on the Windows version used.

WD on for e.g. Windows 7 is significantly limited compared to WD/MSE on Windows 10. If new features are added to WD on the next Windows version, they won't be backported to the old Windows. Let's see how MS handles this....at least 3rd party products are OS-agnostic in the Windows family.

 

The only reason, WD has got better, because of the pressure by other AVs. That is, what the competition is good for.

 

I agree. Also by improving WD, MS will push other vendors to improve their products also. In the end users will benefit from this competition.