14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Windows Defender antivirus is currently protecting more than half of the Windows devices out there, according to a company official.
In other words, out of the Windows devices where Windows Defender comes pre-installed, 50 percent stick with Microsoft’s antivirus, with the rest disabling it and switching to third-party protection.
This is an important achievement for Microsoft, especially because in the last decade, third-party security software has become more or less mandatory on a Windows device given the security risks.
Windows Defender, the leading AV
But at the same time, Windows Defender itself improved a lot lately, so defending more than half of the Windows devices out there is something that’s not necessarily surprising. According to the latest round of antivirus tests from AV-TEST, Windows Defender is one of the leading security products on the market, with its performance matching the one from third-party vendors like Kaspersky and Symantec.
“Windows Defender already has more than a 50% share in the Windows ecosystem. So that's more than half a billion machines that are running Windows Defender in an active mode as the primary antivirus. And it has grown pretty significantly and is among the best now,” Tanmay Ganacharya, general manager of Microsoft ATP security research, told ZDNet.
“Windows Defender is protecting more than 50% of the Windows ecosystem, so we're a big target, and everyone wants to evade us to get the maximum number of victims. We've predicted this is going to happen, and this is why we invested in this before it happened.”
Windows Defender is now at the core of a large security arsenal on Windows 10, powering what’s being called Windows Security and being part of a central hub that includes among others parental controls and account protection tools. More recently, Microsoft has also released its first version of Microsoft Defender, a rebranded version of Windows Defender, on Macs.