Slashdot Mirror
Google Chrome Engineer Says Windows Defender 'the Only Well Behaved Antivirus', Cites 'Tons of Empirical Data' (onmsft.com)
Days after former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan said that antivirus security suites are not necessary, and AV vendors are of little help. A Google Chrome engineer has echoed the same message, reaffirming that Microsoft's built-in software is indeed the most well-behaved security suite. From a report: Apparently the disdain for 3rd party AV solutions runs deep amongst browser developers, as in response to the threads a Google engineer, Justin Schuh, had this to say: "Browser makers don't complain about Microsoft Defender because we have tons of empirical data showing that it's the only well behaved AV."
I clicked on the link, get a popup asking me to disable my ad-blocker...fine. Done. Turns out the article is about a paragraph and just regurgitates some twitter garbage. Utterly useless site.
AV software forging SSL certificates is downright baffling. A client of mine kept having his website marked as insecure despite having an SSL certificate and all tests showing it was working properly. Turns out it was a false positive from his AV software and there's literally nothing you can do about it besides telling someone to uninstall their AV.
https://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php
Just to summarize with a few popular AVs
Microsoft: 97% detection rate, 23 false positives
McAfee: 97.9% detection rate, 57 false positives
Kaspersky: 99.8% detection rate, 1 false positives
Avast: 99.6% detection rate, 13 false positives
F-Secure: 99.9% detection rate, 140 false positives
Doesn't look like MS is particularly bad.
Same here, to be honest. AVG became unusable due to bloat a couple of years ago. Avast can have some serious issues when presented with a combination of Windows 10 with Anniversary Update and a Skylake CPU. The remainder all seem to be as bad as much of the malware they ostensibly protect you from.
I confess I spent a while feeling paranoid after I finally gave in and uninstalled Avast, but a few months on, I've had no problems with a combination of Windows Defender and a weekly Malwarebytes scan.
They're not glorifying effectiveness (though most testing shows they all are pretty equal now) instead they're explaining that Microsoft's solution behaves well with applications which is generally true as it's less invasive.
As a former developer of web browsers (6 years of it), I can confirm that from a developer's point of view, Microsoft hooks more cleanly into the sockets API than the other's I've used.
Don't get your panties in a bunch.
Black-holing garbage domains (ad sources and trackers especially) is definitely a good idea but the problem with a hosts file is that you can't do wildcards, so while you can easily block "foo.domain.com" and "bar.domain.com", you can't block "{random string}.domain.com" unless you know what "{random string}" is in advance - to do that requires either a DNS based blocklist or some other software tool. That's getting to be a problem given that marketing/tracking companies are slowly (and it's taken them long enough) waking up to the possibilty that you can use "{random string}" as a wildcarded DNS entry to track whether a link was looked at or not just as effectively as a custom URL or cookie.
Also, to add to the GP's comment about the importance of an Ad-Blocker, let's not forget blocking auto-run of certain browser plugins and the ability to whitelist sites that can run JavaScript / save cookies.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!