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  • SirWinston
    +3

    This question is for the group : What about windows defender? I heard that that is all you need, or maybe I am just naive.

    • fred (edited 8 years ago)
      +4

      IT admin here. Windows Defender in the modern form (ie: Windows 8+) is basically Microsoft Security Essentials.

      Arguably they used to have good scores/detection rates, but in the recent couple of years have been the worst in terms of detection rates. That said once signatures are discovered and out there, pretty much everything will detect it.

      But keep in mind these results always move around and fluctuate. AVG used to be the tits, now it ships with a redundant firewall, pop ups to buy it, and can be a pain to clean. MSE was cream of the crop when it first came out, but got worse scores as time proceeded and people would code around its detection mechanisms. Norton/Symantec used to be HUGE, like #1 but is oft not reccomended even in the corporate world (for good reason, they suck now).

      My point is this is an industry that is constantly changing year to year.

      At work, MSE/Defender would be inadequate, and we use Trend for our corporate AV. Kaspersky is also currently rated one of the best AV out there.

      But there is a trade-off in many cases, as they tend to be more obtrusive to an end user (ie: Trend has deleted/quarantined mail in outlook, stopped legit executables from running or working,caused CPU cycles to freak out, memory leaks etc and just breaking installers etc). However we have the resources and expertise to troubleshoot and mitigate a lot of that.

      At home, i use MSE/windows defender and Malwarebytes Premium (like 25/year for 3 machines) and I am fine with it as a last line of defence. In fact even the Malwarebytes addition is recent (like the last couple months) and i just used MSE prior to that.

      The best thing you can do is have backups and learn some basic security practices are really mostly sufficient (dont click on pop-ups and other links you dont recognize, actually read prompts and look for check boxes, know what you are installing, nothing is free, dont randomly give login creds etc). So i would never waste time trying to clean an infected system (as once its comprimised its always comprimised, i would simply be restoring from backup.

      • daanish
        +2

        This is the correct answer.

      • PushPull
        +1

        Thank you for this. The more I've read about this, the more I tended to lean this direction. I just finished a mash-up review of the 'top' AV of 2015, and EVERY AV had a lot of negative comments about it taking over computers, being hard to remove, asking for $$$, etc. I started seeing a lot of information about people doing exactly what you recommend, and I think I'll go with that.

    • spaceghoti
      +2

      There's no such thing as "perfect security." If you want to go with Windows Defender you can, but never use any security application alone. Always run them in concert with other anti-malware programs like Malwarebytes and SpyBot.