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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Everyone is talking about how Windows Defender is better now, and don’t get me wrong, it is, BUT there’s also the fact that in the wild west days of the internet, people went to *far more* unknown sites. Now something like 90%+ of internet traffic flows through 5-10 giant conglomerate sites, and the opportunity to spread malware is far lower. It’s why phishing has become a far more popular means of distributing malware and harvesting information.
Windows started to take security more seriously, for one, and for another many technological strides in virus detection were made by others from the crappy signature detection towards malicious behavior, which introduced detection a lot, and Windows was able to piggy back off of those concepts to make Defender an actually decent thing.
A few years ago, Microsoft made big improvements to its built-in antivirus, Windows Defender, making it much stronger and better at catching bad stuff. This means it became just as good as other antivirus programs you used to have to buy or get for free, like Avast. So now, you don’t need extra antivirus because Windows Defender can do a great job all by itself, keeping your computer safe from viruses and other bad things.
Microsoft bought an AV company, GeCAD, in 2003. I was working for another AV company back then and that was one of the companies Microsoft considered as well buying.
I think one thing that also happened was so called “anti-virus” software was nothing more then ad-ware itself
This caused a problem for microsoft , windows might have needed anti-virus software but the most popular “free” anti-virus software was basically nothing more then ad-ware itself meaning the whole windows user experience was bad
You needed to either pay for virus protection in addition to paying for windows, or potentially install a “free” anti-virus software what would just push ads to your system
They feared people would just go to apple (or maybe less but linux) so they needed to fix the problem and released their own anti-virus
so should I stop buying Malwarebytes?
Microsoft recognized that there was a huge enterprise market for selling cyber security software to big businesses. They also recognized that they were not taken seriously as a security software provider due to the high volume of operating system vulnerabilities and low quality of their consumer-grade endpoint protection. They ultimately made a huge investment in talent, process, and technology to build their operating systems more securely and build software to protect and detect cyber attacks against systems.
The result is that Microsoft is the de facto standard for consumer-grade endpoint protection. They are also quickly gaining market share for securing enterprises, which is where the revenue opportunities are and what gives them the return on their investment.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, their Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution, is competing with the big boys like CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. Their logging solution, Sentinel, is competing with the big boys like Splunk. Once you have those two solutions locked with a single provider, adding on cheaper security modules for cloud, identities, etc. becomes a no-brainer because you’re leveraging an ecosystem that already knows your environment well. If executed successfully, Microsoft could just become the de facto standard for securing enterprise environments, stealing a lot of big budgets from competitors.
Virus changed ;
in the past the goal was to either destroy your file or try to make you pay a ransom. So to stop you from using your PC.
Now, it’s better for pirates to get data, so they don’t want anymore to break your computer, they want to send a spyware.
This could be way wrong but from what I remember MS was banned from putting it’s own anti virus software bundled into windows because of the antitrust case
Microsoft is now able to sell its operating system as an operating system and a security solution. In the past, antivirus companies had to jump over hoops to interact with Microsoft SMEs and figure out how to best design their software. Over time, this has resulted in antivirus software acting similarly to the viruses they hope to prevent, bogging down systems since Norton doesn’t want to spend money on a MS engineer to consult for them. Governments, large corporations, and the like are extremely eager to fork over money for Windows going forward if it means they get the warm-and-fuzzy of a reputable antivirus solution as well. And with WufB and other Windows features continuing to mature, the operating system blurs the line between OS and security solution more and more each day. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have McAfee/Trellix uninstalled from my USAF computer — hopefully Tanium is next.
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