Windows Defender v ESET
- Thread starter wayzgoose
- Start date
okay so say you get 100% replies that it is fine to not pay for extra protection so you don’t then down the line something does happen ... what then?
Or you get 100% replies that it’s not up to scratch and need better then down the line something happens ... what then?
it’s the same with or without anti virus, they are all susceptible regardless so the question is how secure do you want to try and be and what is the cost to the business
I personally ensure I have two machines (a desktop and laptop) just in case, yes there is a cost but for me the pros outweigh the cost
so work that out and you’ll have your answer
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Opinion isn’t fact when dealing with technology and especially anti virus they are all susceptible and the simplest thing is to learn the dos and donts to protect yourself
the rest IMO is your own piece of mind at how secure things are
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Ive been Defender only for several years now with absolutely no problems at all, I feel very confident in its alerting and prevention of nasty stuff... However I'm quite tech savvy anyway so dont take huge risks when downloading or running software from *dodgy* sources.
I would fully expect that in some instances, a very nasty attack might be able to bypass defender so it really depends on whos using the machine and whether any risks are being taken above normal.
I would fully expect that in some instances, a very nasty attack might be able to bypass defender so it really depends on whos using the machine and whether any risks are being taken above normal.
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Pay for a security solution. Windows defender performs standard at best and they barley publish any whitepapers like Kaspersky or Eset do. If your computer came with W10 OEM installed, Microsoft charges about £4.50 for the license per PC.
£4.50 is not much for an OS and ongoing security support in the form of Defender. You pay 10 times more per year for eset.
When was the last time you got sick and decided let's get the cheapest doctor and medication available for treatment. Same goes for security solutions on devices. You get what you pay for that excludes the likes of std's such as McAfee, Norton, Avast and some others. .....
Defender has almost no 2nd line of defences. It will do the trick but a huge gamble that MS gets it right without charging money for it.
£4.50 is not much for an OS and ongoing security support in the form of Defender. You pay 10 times more per year for eset.
When was the last time you got sick and decided let's get the cheapest doctor and medication available for treatment. Same goes for security solutions on devices. You get what you pay for that excludes the likes of std's such as McAfee, Norton, Avast and some others. .....
Defender has almost no 2nd line of defences. It will do the trick but a huge gamble that MS gets it right without charging money for it.
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I think that Windows Defender has been assessed independently and found to be as good or better than ESET and others in terms of it's raw ability to defend against key threats .
See for example the independent av test site tables at AV-Test dot org
(sorry i am a new member and don't have ability to post link yet)
I visit clients and assist with software in my work - though I am not a PC specialist as such - but I often end up helping them with PC Setup as it affects related issues for the desktop software we support and nowadays the web browser set up for all the cloud based software we support
If you look on the website mentioned above and go to the Windows 10 AV for business tables you will see that Windows Defender scores 6 and ESET only 5 as at Dec 2019 for AV protection - though ESET beats Defender on Performance . So if you have a slower pc or run processor-intensive apps that might mean ESET is a better option for you.
ESET also beats Defender by a half point in their rankings on usability. But that can be a little subjective eg if you are already used to Defender and know your way around it. Though I suspect ESET allows more fine-grained tuning.
One thing is I have noticed in practice is that ESET clashes with certain desktop software and I have had to specifically exclude the data files relating to one app in order to have that app work. The app maker issued a specific warning re ESET in fact.
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Also as regards Paying vs free software
- I don't agree with the suggestion that 'you get what you pay for' because Anti Virus firms set prices based on what they think the market can bear - it's not a cost-based pricing - the cost is largely a sunk cost in terms of developing the engine and price doesn't reflect the 'cost of manufacture' in the way that some physical products are priced. In the pre internet era we could rely on price to some extent as a surrogate for quality - but price is no longer a reliable indicator of the quality of a product - neither in the the physical world (where brand is everything and item can be often just manufactured cheaply abroad) nor in the virtual world of software.
And the argument that paying for support to a company that just makes Anti virus software, will give you better technical product than a company like Microsoft with very deep pockets and thousands of technical engineers doesn't stack up.
Having said which I am not a huge fan of Microsoft products generally but they are improving.
It seems to me that pricing depends on *perception* of brand primarily.
It does sometimes reflect additional product features eg if they are going after the larger firm market then the product will have additional features that make it easier to manage a large number of PCs on a network say - remote configuration and easy cloning of setups. And so they know they can justify a higher price.
There is understandably an instinct to think that something that is free is not as good but that just isn't the case for many things in IT. Microsoft responded to the damage being done to their brand by the enormous volume of successful attacks on systems where users had no AV software at all and so this is why they issued a free software product - to protect their brand. Just because they were not charging the end user did not mean it wasn't a good product. Just that they chose to swallow the cost in order to gain from the big improvement to people's perception of running a Microsoft operating system on their PC
The other advantage of using the built in Defender system is that it is less likely to clash with Microsoft's own software. Occasionally an operating system update will cause a clash with third party software - whereas you would think (or hope) that Microsoft would not clash with their own system. With Windows 10 defaulting to loading regular updates this could be more and more of an issue.
I would say that if you are a small business and you want to save a few pennies , you would not be taking a risk by relying on Defender. But if you have a larger number of PCs and want more sophisticated management of them en masse, or if you want very fine grained control of the configuration (Eg if you have apps that tend not to play well with AV software) then you might be better looking at third party products in that list.
Final caveat - as the threat landscape is constantly changing in AV and malware generally, if you are reading this post and it's more than six months old, then review that table again for the latest advice. As things change quite a bit.
For that reason I would also not recommend signing up to the ESET (or anyone else's) three year deal - even if it's at a discount - buy it on an annual basis so you can move away from a brand that ends up falling behind on the technology as sometimes happens.
Kaspersky mentioned above has been tarnished by association with Russian outfits and Barclays stoppped offering it free to customers in 2017 for that reason "as a precaution". I think it is worth looking into who owns the AV company you choose / where it is run from.
(see BBC article from 2017 - "Kaspersky Labs: Warning over Russian anti-virus software")
- I don't agree with the suggestion that 'you get what you pay for' because Anti Virus firms set prices based on what they think the market can bear - it's not a cost-based pricing - the cost is largely a sunk cost in terms of developing the engine and price doesn't reflect the 'cost of manufacture' in the way that some physical products are priced. In the pre internet era we could rely on price to some extent as a surrogate for quality - but price is no longer a reliable indicator of the quality of a product - neither in the the physical world (where brand is everything and item can be often just manufactured cheaply abroad) nor in the virtual world of software.
And the argument that paying for support to a company that just makes Anti virus software, will give you better technical product than a company like Microsoft with very deep pockets and thousands of technical engineers doesn't stack up.
Having said which I am not a huge fan of Microsoft products generally but they are improving.
It seems to me that pricing depends on *perception* of brand primarily.
It does sometimes reflect additional product features eg if they are going after the larger firm market then the product will have additional features that make it easier to manage a large number of PCs on a network say - remote configuration and easy cloning of setups. And so they know they can justify a higher price.
There is understandably an instinct to think that something that is free is not as good but that just isn't the case for many things in IT. Microsoft responded to the damage being done to their brand by the enormous volume of successful attacks on systems where users had no AV software at all and so this is why they issued a free software product - to protect their brand. Just because they were not charging the end user did not mean it wasn't a good product. Just that they chose to swallow the cost in order to gain from the big improvement to people's perception of running a Microsoft operating system on their PC
The other advantage of using the built in Defender system is that it is less likely to clash with Microsoft's own software. Occasionally an operating system update will cause a clash with third party software - whereas you would think (or hope) that Microsoft would not clash with their own system. With Windows 10 defaulting to loading regular updates this could be more and more of an issue.
I would say that if you are a small business and you want to save a few pennies , you would not be taking a risk by relying on Defender. But if you have a larger number of PCs and want more sophisticated management of them en masse, or if you want very fine grained control of the configuration (Eg if you have apps that tend not to play well with AV software) then you might be better looking at third party products in that list.
Final caveat - as the threat landscape is constantly changing in AV and malware generally, if you are reading this post and it's more than six months old, then review that table again for the latest advice. As things change quite a bit.
For that reason I would also not recommend signing up to the ESET (or anyone else's) three year deal - even if it's at a discount - buy it on an annual basis so you can move away from a brand that ends up falling behind on the technology as sometimes happens.
Kaspersky mentioned above has been tarnished by association with Russian outfits and Barclays stoppped offering it free to customers in 2017 for that reason "as a precaution". I think it is worth looking into who owns the AV company you choose / where it is run from.
(see BBC article from 2017 - "Kaspersky Labs: Warning over Russian anti-virus software")
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I'm not sure what you are smoking in your spare time. Kaspersky apparently bad but Eset okay. ESET is a Slovak internet security company with russian core founders. The BBC article was poor at best. What concerns me is your general thinking that US companies are good and your friend and russians must be the bad ones. They are all bad.
Not sure about synthetic testing of AV's but it is poor at best. We work on quite a few computers day in and day out and if there were problems it was running Windows Defender. In a real world it is not coming even close for protection compared to companies who offer paid solutions. Here are our american friends recently caught: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...shot-after-getting-caught-selling-users-data/
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You don't need any for of backup until you find a problem that costs far more time and energy plus money to solve
If you worried about a few pounds of software then you don't have a business, you have a hobby
All good management consider the worst case scenario and try and make sure you have it covered as far as practical
Imagine if you are hit with a ransom virus or a fire, and cannot afford to pay and unable to work, Can you just go out a buy a fresh computer and have the system back up and running in a couple of days and be back making money and sales
Time to start becoming a manager and analyzing where you are going, what precautions are needed and spend more time looking on profit rather than playing about with a few quid savings
If you worried about a few pounds of software then you don't have a business, you have a hobby
All good management consider the worst case scenario and try and make sure you have it covered as far as practical
Imagine if you are hit with a ransom virus or a fire, and cannot afford to pay and unable to work, Can you just go out a buy a fresh computer and have the system back up and running in a couple of days and be back making money and sales
Time to start becoming a manager and analyzing where you are going, what precautions are needed and spend more time looking on profit rather than playing about with a few quid savings
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- Original Poster
- #14
Oh dear, my mistake because I included the word "paying" which has brought out the usual responses that ignore the question and spout the usual business advise that wasn't requested. Was purely a question for more knowledgeable people to share whether a much improved embedded system may actually be preferable/as good as/better than an added virus program.
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F
ffox
Defender is good. I've not used any paid for firewall or antivirus apps for the last three years.
Having said that, you need to be conscious of what you are defending and what you are defending against.
Windows Defender will protect against most common, and known, viruses. and that includes ransom ware and Mal ware. What it won't protect you against is Unknown viruses. Neither will any other antivirus software. If the bad guys create and launch a new virus that does not display common virus like activity no antivirus software in the world will identify it until some poor fools have been adversely affected and have reported it to the anti virus and security community. The purveyors of computer protection software will then develop a defense and, when one make a breakthrough, the others will follow on.
Given the above, you cannot depend on any antivirus software for complete protection.
In addition to antivirus you need a complete and comprehensive recovery strategy, which will include rapid identification of suspicious software activity, isolation of any affected PC or server and, where necessary, complete wipe and re-image of any affected computer.
The principal aim is business continuity, rather than protection.
Having said that, you need to be conscious of what you are defending and what you are defending against.
Windows Defender will protect against most common, and known, viruses. and that includes ransom ware and Mal ware. What it won't protect you against is Unknown viruses. Neither will any other antivirus software. If the bad guys create and launch a new virus that does not display common virus like activity no antivirus software in the world will identify it until some poor fools have been adversely affected and have reported it to the anti virus and security community. The purveyors of computer protection software will then develop a defense and, when one make a breakthrough, the others will follow on.
Given the above, you cannot depend on any antivirus software for complete protection.
In addition to antivirus you need a complete and comprehensive recovery strategy, which will include rapid identification of suspicious software activity, isolation of any affected PC or server and, where necessary, complete wipe and re-image of any affected computer.
The principal aim is business continuity, rather than protection.
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That is actually not true, in synthetic testing of antivirus software this method is being used to determine how good the AV engine is working for something that is not in their database signatures. Even with completely unknown threats Eset and Kasperksy scored well over 95% detection rate versus almost 0% from Windows Defender.
You get what you pay for or if something is going wrong how fast they can updates signatures and offer advanced features
For backup strategies the problem lies in the infection itself, modern ransomware can be sitting dormant for month before it executes. Backups wont help at that stage as the time of infection is unknown.
In regards to new threats. Kaspersky was the first AV that detected W10 accessing webcam and microphone randomly without requiring permission in apps that didn't even have use for a webcam. A couple days later MS apologised and blamed it on a random hardware test routine in W10. I doubt Defender would have picked up on that.
There is another thread on here where somebody posted links to information. Interestingly kaspersky blocks it , defender doesn't.
Here is the link from the other post on here: https://www.companydebt.com/hmrc-tax-problems/what-can-hmrc-bailiffs-take/
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F
ffox
So, that means up to 5% of unknown viruses may affect even Eset and Kaspersky users. The point is that no virus protection is 100%.
That's okay for anyone who has not been infected, but not so good for the small percentage that have been. For those, business stops, unless they have a sound recovery strategy.
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Agree with what people are saying about Defender. Windows have come a long way.
Fact is there's so many on the market you need to choose what's right for your budget, devices type and how many) and what you want to protect against.
Remember, no matter how much you spend on security, you (i.e. humans) are the weakest link
Fact is there's so many on the market you need to choose what's right for your budget, devices type and how many) and what you want to protect against.
Remember, no matter how much you spend on security, you (i.e. humans) are the weakest link
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