App also provides "security tips," checks the antivirus status of other devices.
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Microsoft Defender extends malware protection to macOS and Android—for a price
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One of the rare MS apps that are actually of use on modern Windows', not sure about other platforms tho
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Amazon routinely has it on sale for ~50E (in Europe where the usual price is also 99E/year) which is great value for 6 users x 5 devices, at least for the 1TB of storage for each user.
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Sophos Home free tier is a great alternative for Mac and PC users. M1 native and a viable security company.
No Linux support though - so I'm a bit disappointed there.
No Linux support though - so I'm a bit disappointed there.
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Not entirely true: it requires a Microsoft 365 Family or Personal subscription (your school account, for instance, won't work).
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IMO their 365 plan is a great value. Keep in mind the plan gives you 6TB of cloud storage (1TB x 6 users) for $8.33/mo. If you don’t have 6 users, you can still use the space by linking them via the sharing feature.
At that point, you are basically getting the rest of the features (Office, Defender, etc) for free.
At that point, you are basically getting the rest of the features (Office, Defender, etc) for free.
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Yup. It's a decent price for 6TB of storage. The access to legit Office apps is basically a free bonus.
Also, apparently, a screen time and locating tracking app for families. Neat.
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That's how all the M365 apps work. Free to download but you have to sign in with your subscription, this is nothing new. Plus with all the restrictions about selling digital services in apps and platform owners demanding a cut it's no wonder you can't just sign up to use in the app
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I'm still using a standalone version of Office 2016. Otherwise, I def. would've considered this. Other bonuses include new versions of Office products are included with the subscription, along with tech support (which I hear is better).
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What's the alternative to get an app installed on your phone if not via an app store? Sideloading? And how's that any different from the Netflix app which is there and could create the same expectation that you install it and just get to watch stuff?
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Mungus the Unhyphenated
Ars Tribunus Militum
Did the same here. OneNote is basically the gateway drug to it. Easy to share notebooks, OneDrive storage behind it just works. My wife ditched Evernote and Google drive in favor of it. For basically a competitive price for cloud storage, Office applications plus the inherent cloud syncing really is essentially free.
If we had any Macs (used to, but no longer), this offer of Defender for Mac might be interesting. Macs aren't immune to malware. I'm not sure about the usefulness on phones; both IOS and Android have adequate sandboxing as long as you're not downloading dodgy apps. For my use case I'm not sure if it's worth any performance hit.
On the other hand, we're setting my elderly mom up with an Android phone for use when she travels, and put her on our O365 subscription. She'd been getting disenchanted with Gmail's changes in the web interface so now she can have her Gmail account and read mail in Outlook, which she's familiar with from her professional life. She likes keeping information in OneNote, and now with the new Secure Vault feature in O365/OneDrive, she'll be able to store important documents there and keep it locked up behind 2FA and encryption. She'll probably want Defender on the phone; she's more tech savvy than most people her age (over 80!) but she's paranoid about viruses and spyware. It'll be a nice bit of peace-of-mind. The whole service makes the inevitable tech management for an aging family member a good bit simpler.
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I need to see John Hodgman explain this to Justin Long in a commercial.
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My company also has used the enterprise version for a while. IMO it could weigh pretty heavily on performance, with the AV daemon taking a pretty constant 1,5-2 GB of memory, and doubled CPU usage for any file I/O. Though it's worth noting that we have *everything* installed, including the network monitoring and the data loss prevention thing.
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The movement to force everyone to rent anything having any value, and thus ensuring we are all perpetual paupers is building steam. It's pure evil. And, there is almost nothing we can do to resist. Except, symbolically, don't take the hook on garbage software. We have no idea what the real cost is, at all.
"Rentier capitalism is a term currently used to describe the belief in economic practices of monopolization of access to any kind of property (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society." ~Wikipedia
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I've not dealt with the mac endpoint client, so I can't comment on it specifically; but all the really interesting stuff(conveniently complicated by pointless branding overlap) in the for-business 'defender' is in the data collection and aggregation capabilities; no so much in doing the basic adequate-AV-client stuff that the 'defender' built into win10 does across SKUs.
You get application and configuration inventory across all enrolled endpoints, which makes keeping an eye on patch compliance and security-relevant configuration settings very convenient; and the agent also collects a lot of activity information (here is the reference information they provide for querying gathered data, to give an idea); with activity information also tied in with events from AAD and o365 if you are using those.
I'd hope that the endpoint AV stuff isn't too desperately inadequate compared to the competition; but the point of putting it on an organization's devices is really getting the information about activity across devices; tracking...interesting...behavior on the part of certain credentials or files; not it being a particularly thrilling endpoint AV(not that endpoint AV is supposed to be thrilling; something that certain of the noisier vendors seem to forget).
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Defender is all I've been using on Windows for some time now and it's always seemed adequate; unintrusive, scheduled scans run quickly without too much system impact etc.
If it can do that for macOS I may consider it, but it depends on the level of integration required.
After I got sick of dodgy kexts causing problems I swore off any AV that requires them.
I've just been using ClamAV for a while with a fairly simple script to trigger automatic scans of new files arriving in certain folders (~/Downloads and the like), plus trigger notifications if anything is found, and this suits me fine on top of occasional wide scans. Only problem with ClamAV is it's either incredibly slow to start up (running via clamscan) or it holds onto a pretty big chunk of RAM to leave it open (running via clamd + clamdscan), nearly 1.5gb that it doesn't like to give up, so it's not an ideal option either as you're either running with an enormous delay before anything gets scanned, or with a big chunk of RAM just permanently in use.
If it can do that for macOS I may consider it, but it depends on the level of integration required.
After I got sick of dodgy kexts causing problems I swore off any AV that requires them.
I've just been using ClamAV for a while with a fairly simple script to trigger automatic scans of new files arriving in certain folders (~/Downloads and the like), plus trigger notifications if anything is found, and this suits me fine on top of occasional wide scans. Only problem with ClamAV is it's either incredibly slow to start up (running via clamscan) or it holds onto a pretty big chunk of RAM to leave it open (running via clamd + clamdscan), nearly 1.5gb that it doesn't like to give up, so it's not an ideal option either as you're either running with an enormous delay before anything gets scanned, or with a big chunk of RAM just permanently in use.
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In this case, you're not the subscriber. You're just a user on someone else's subscription.
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The big advantages are that:
1) It's free with Windows, no subscription required unlike virtually every other solution
2) It gets updated regularly by Microsoft, which arguably has more staying power than most security software companies
3) It's relatively light on resource consumption compared to similar offerings from Norton/McAfee/etc
If you need more comprehensive and granular security on your systems and don't mind paying monthly for it, then there are "better" 3rd party tools. But for the majority of users, Defender is the best option. I don't have O365 personally, but as part of the complete package it seems like a nice value-add.
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We've recently rolled MDATP out as well and I agree that it's a bit of a resource hog. After some tuning, it's alright, but an security product should default to having as little impact as possible.
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Yeah. I use Windows Defender because it works well enough, and most importantly, it is totally hands off. It just works. I don't have to think about it.
If it comes to protecting other devices and having to think about it and fuss with it, there are other products I'd choose before Defender.
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robert.walter
Ars Praefectus
Serious question: Given that my Mac has X-Protect as standard for free, why would I need a subscription fro MS (or anyone else)?
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Microsoft products on macOS generally tend not to integrate well with the system. Office, Edge, Teams are good examples of this. It’s hard to trust they are doing the right thing for something as sensitive as security and without compromising battery life or performance.
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Is Sophos for Mac good these days? When I was at Google ~10-12 years ago, our security team decided that using no antivirus was better than using Sophos on Macs and made everyone uninstall it. They said it ran at a high privilege level, was full of bugs, and had a huge attack surface that made it more risky than running without antivirus at all.
But that was 10+ years ago, at a high-value target under active attack by nation-states. Hopefully things are different now, especially for individual users. Does anyone know of any third-party audits of Sophos or any other Mac security software?
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Free AV programs in general are terrible. Virtually all the functionality is paywalled, the relentless ads to upgrade are annoying, dedicating 20% of your CPU to "active monitoring" sucks, and that's all assuming that the program itself isn't just malware in disguise. Might as well go naked at that point.
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No, it's true: Macs aren't immune to malware. It's just that nobody has bothered to write any malware for Macs.
/s
(Seriously, good luck getting your malware past Gatekeeper.)
/s
(Seriously, good luck getting your malware past Gatekeeper.)
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