4 ms·

Windows Defender has been shown time and time again in comparatives to be not much better than nothing. Its only plus point was it's low resource requirement.

• romanovcode 10y ago
  Heh, those comparatives more often than not are sponsored by AV companies. That's why every comparative will show different Nr. 1 AV software.
  • ionised 10y ago
    As far as I know, these guys are totally independent; https://www.av-comparatives.org/about-us/ https://www.av-comparatives.org/about-us/ I may be wrong, but I can't find any info as to their sponsors other than universities and volunteer researchers. And I'm not sure how that addresses what I said about Defender being borderline useless, because they come up short across most tests from what I remember. Unless it has drastically improved in the last year.
    • cvwright 10y ago
      I think AV Comparatives are independent -- at least they were when I last had to read up on all this several years ago. At the time (2010ish), they even had a few reports where they showed that pretty much all the AV products were quite bad. Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
      • krylon 10y ago
        > Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources. Those aren't mutually exclusive... ;-) Some things never change, I guess. As a Windows admin who uses Unix-ish systems exclusively at home, I am a little clueless sometimes. When using AV software on our computers, I can at least point to that and say I did what I could (be reasonably expected to do), but whenever I read what people who really know about IT security have to say about the AV industry, I get the feeling it's all just a bunch of charlatans and snake oil peddlers. But the latter is a little difficult to explain to my boss without sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic.
    • AntivirusExpert 10y ago
      Here's a tool that aggregates all the results from AV-comparatives and other independent labs: https://bestantivirus.reviews/tools/test-results-calculator https://bestantivirus.reviews/tools/test-results-calculator I'd like to mention that these labs are all independent, but they're all pay-to-play - meaning that they get paid to test, but not to assign a better score. Labs which are AMTSO-certified are committed to testing by predetermined standards in order for the results to be comparable across labs and over time. Now, while the methodology guidelines are the same for all of them, the methods themselves vary, and the malware against which AV software is tested differs between tests. By using the tool above you get a more statistically significant results because it includes tests over time, and across multiple AMTSO-certified organizations.
• bqe 10y ago
  Given the litany of serious, exploitable flaws major AVs have had recently, nothing is better than something.
  • ionised 10y ago
    The point I'm making is, Defender is no better than these AV companies as it fails detection tests just as much as they do, if not more. romanovcode implied that because AV tests are frequently sponsored by AV companies, that would somehow negate Defender's consistently poor results (which would make no sense, as it has poor results pretty much universally across different tests).