If threats are becoming more and more present on the Internet, the question of the usefulness of an antivirus arises in the face of Microsoft’s efforts to improve its tool directly integrated into Windows.
You may not know it, but Windows has included an antivirus since 2006. Nearly twenty years ago, Microsoft launched Microsoft Defender on Windows XP, which was first presented as software to fight against viruses. programs spying on the user’s actions – for example to recover their login credentials.
A free antivirus integrated into Windows sufficient?
Mocked in its early days, Microsoft’s antivirus has been extensively overhauled over the years, integrating the Microsoft Security Essentials suite from Windows 8. Its objective is to monitor your operating system in order to remove spyware and viruses that can occur. stay there for free. The company finally added it automatically to Windows without the user needing to do anything, particularly within Edge, the company’s browser which replaced Internet Explorer.
It also has additional protections compared to its debut, such as protection against ransomware.
Microsoft Defender is easily accessible from the Start menu and is hidden behind the name “Windows Security”. Most of the time, it works without you having to do anything, regularly scanning your storage spaces to prevent malware from causing problems. However, you can run a complete scan manually.
But Microsoft Defender isn’t the only defense available. Over the years and the increase in threats on the web, browsers themselves have equipped themselves with powerful security measures to prevent a user from being defrauded. We can thus count on a blacklist of sites from Google or Microsoft, but also from Apple, without counting on the generalization of HTTPS, which allows you to benefit from a so-called “secure” connection.
Are Microsoft Defender, but also anti-malware software like Malwarebytes and an up-to-date browser still enough to replace a paid antivirus suite like Norton or Bitdefender? The question deserves to be asked at a time when threats are aimed more at companies collecting data than at users themselves.
In a 2021 survey by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), it appears that most of today’s malware primarily seeks to recover its victim’s data through inattention, for example with an email or a SMS pretending to be a service. While an antivirus can tell you that the link is suspicious, it is not infallible.
Threats have changed targets
And contrary to what one might believe, Windows’ built-in antivirus can’t do everything. To strengthen their offers, paid antiviruses today include additional solutions that could appeal to a certain audience. We think in particular of VPNs, which allow you to hide your identity on the web by using an IP address from another country.
Above all, third-party antivirus solutions generally provide access to an advanced system of parental controls or even a password manager. If you don’t like the idea of storing everything on Microsoft or Google servers, antiviruses, theoretically much safer in this regard, can therefore prove to be a viable solution.
Whether it is Norton, Bitdefender or Avast, it is in the details of the offers that we find notable features: protection against cryptocurrency mining is one of them, as is the monitoring of your data on the web and the dark web to know if you are at risk of phishing attempts. Norton also includes specific solutions for gamers, for example against denial of service (DDoS) attacks which are sometimes used by hackers during your online games.
In 2020, the New York Times was already asking the question of the usefulness of a paid antivirus compared to Microsoft’s free solution. The answer was not as obvious as today, when the American company has increased the number of updates, making its software much more efficient than before.
On Mac, or even on iPhone, the observation is however much more implacable. We quickly see that most players in the field communicate little on the subject. On the one hand, Apple is taking advantage of the closure of its operating systems to preserve the user as much as possible – most will thus go through the theoretically safer environment of the App store, on the other hand, the numerous protections by default integrated into macOS already make it possible to avoid malicious attempts.
In short, although completely doing without a “premium” antivirus may seem logical today for an average user, you must nevertheless remain attentive to what you download and the sites you visit. Periodically scanning your operating system with other tools, like Malwarebytes or using a password manager, can be a good backup solution to help with software built into macOS or Windows, and this, without interfering in the performance of the machine.
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