Tbf windows defender is pretty good.
102It has to be, Otherwise Windows would have succumb to microsoft's antisecure culture by now.
24Anti-secure culture? Things have changed a lot since the days of Nimda, SQL Slammer, etc.
11
It is fucking horrible with false positives though. RIP if you have a Kali ISO sitting on one of your drives.
That and the Antimalware service executable gets hung up and chugs 30-50% of your CPU and RAM and won't stop.
10It's way too reliant on their cloud infrastructure though, causing it to detect and react to malware slower than other solutions and it turns to shit the second the network disconnects. The PC security channel on YouTube has some good analysis of it.
3To be honest, for most users, if they're not on the Internet; it's not that big of a deal for their antivirus to be less effective. Most threats come from being dumb on the web.
4
That thing literally saved Windows, as most users would otherwise have had to install shitty freeware like Avast or pay for premium antivirus solutions, basically paying to try to close loopholes that Microsoft made in the first place.
42💯
I almost opted to move my parents to use Linux instead of Windows because of how much time I was spending on fixing the malware and viruses they'd get. Then enter Windows Defender.
Now all I have to deal with is when they get the occasional scam call... "Yes, it's Bob from Microsoft, you need to wire us $900 to fix a virus."
12Before Defender it was called Microsoft Security Essentials and was a standalone app.
Worked damn good back then as well.
4
Most Windows Programs running with root access is like, I don't know... Windows XP era maybe?
42Windows ME was the last edition to make this assumption. NT was never like that.
21UAC was introduced with vista, IIRC in xp any program would inherit the privileges of the user running them
18
This is Linuxmemes, what did you expect?
Up-to-date knowledge of other systems? lol
6"Up-to-date" is quite unfitting for ~17-18 years :P
1
Probably pre-SP2 for that matter.
5
You laugh but windows defender is awesome. People give windows shit but the reason it's attacked the most is because of it's market share being above and beyond leaps and bounds sun vs tiny fleck of dust in space os market shares that Linux and Mac os have. No one's wasting time hacking the tiny stuff as much just because its a numbers game. Guarenfuckingtee you if Linux was number one market share OS it would be getting attacked way more often than any other OS as well. Dont kid yourselves.
27Hey cut it out we're trying to circle jerk here
16macOS and Linux have additional security features at a system level, on Linux most software comes through controlled repositories or sandboxed flatpaks. There are also tons of multi million dollar companies that constantly try to find and fix kernel level vulnerabilities and a distro like Debian, which is very popular for servers, has had less major vulnerabilities than windows 7 throughout its entire lifecycle and Debian exists for other 30 years. So I’d say Linux is would have a few less (different) attacks
5
Windows NT 3.5 and later NT 4 had C2 security certifications - assuming the system was not connected to a network, and didn't have floppy drives (this was before USB was a thing).
15Dang, a post from 1999!
2
The typo is Windows with a capital W, the rest is just not true, please don't lie😜
8Yeah it literally pops a screen sized warning when anything tries to run as admin. Linux is very vulnerable as well. Hackers are just really good at what they do.
24i am going to turn your skull into pasta
-6
How is it whenever I see a post about 'what anti virus should I use' people are always saying 'just use defender - def don't use avast!'
6Because if you're gonna use an antivirus, Defender does just fine.
They all more or less use the same viral signature database and definitions, and are mostly feature-matched with each other. Why look beyond what your computer came with unless you're installing something integrated with an RMM tool?
18Because, in addition to the other valid points raised, modern "Anti"-Virus Software is often worse than an actual Virus.
There are way too many pop ups, the menus are confusing and constantly try to upsell you. If you want to remove the damn thing usually it doesn't work, or doesn't work completely, or has a separate auto-updater that reinstalls it after the next boot.
False positives screw you over good (Kaspersky killed the Ethernet Network on a buddy's PC. He couldn't use the internet on it until he managed to remove that piece of shit from his system completey) and are not less frequent than with Windows Defender but certainly more annoying (see above example)
If you paid a subscription getting rid of that is a pain as well (BitDefender tried to scam me out of 130€ by sending the billing notif to an email address they shouldn't even have anymore)
Not all of them are shit like that but most are so sticking with the preinstalled Windows Defender that does 95% of the alternatives results in users having a better experience.
4Because defender has an amazing malware detection rate with few false positives.
Much better than even the paid antiviruses like McAfee and Norton.
Avast used to be good, but then it started to show ads every day.
Plus, Defender uses close to no resources to run.
1
windows defender is better than how it used to be where had to buy an expensive proprietary av or download clam av and hope for the best
5Does Smartscreen upload your .exes ? I disable its internet access and would be stupid if it only uses that to download databases or stuff.
3It takes a hash.
13
The only secure Windows is Windows 1.0. There is no network stack in it, and nobody would want to use it anyway.
Anything else is up for grabs.
3but i wanna play reversi
2
Looking at Kenny most Linux users seems to be clueless fanboys
-4I would argue most Linux users have no clue they're Linux users.
3Depends on how you categorize "Linux" User, if you include anything running a Linux Kernel as "Linux" then the vast majority have no clue they're using Linux.
3
I think they're probably just young and enthusiastic. I was like that about linux 20 years ago when I had the energy for it.
1
