Why did the antivirus market change so drastically?

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When I was younger, the standard windows firewall was seen as weak and worth replacing asap with premium or strong free anti viruses, like Avast. What changed to make Windows Defender competitive? It looks like a few years ago something suddenly happened and now everybody on the market has great protection.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In addition to what everyone is saying, I just wanted to add that the Anti-virus/Anti-malware market itself has also shifted drastically in the past 15 years as well, with the rapid onset of Cryptomalware and ransomeware. Malware suddenly got extremely destructive and costly for organizations and individuals, extending further than just data breaches and the occasional infected workstation.

Enterprise grade AV has shifted into “Endpoint Detection and Response(EDR)” , “Managed Detection and Response(MDR)”, and “Extended Detection and Response(XDR)” products which is essentially an AV that also actively scans processes, network traffic, file access, process behavior, ect in addition to typical periodic file scanning, with “Managed” adding a human and analytical element into the fold for faster detection and remediation. Extended is a bit newer, but expands upon EDR/MDR by integrating as much of the organizations infrastructure as possible with data gathering from other devices and networking equipment, then running analytics to further increase Detection and Response rates, an increasing amount of which is now being offloaded to AI.

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