Windows defender is updated very frequently and is running in the background at all times.
Also, unless you are using some shady software e.g. cracks etc.. it is not that easy to catch a computer virus nowadays.
Old habits die hard. Especially among non-tech-savvy people, who in the past were told so many times that antivirus is essential because Windows is easy to infect, that it's hard now to explain to them that the built-in Windows Defender is good enough.
And will often suck your IO and bring your computer to a crawl during say big builds, extracts, installations, etc. I just keep it disabled.
https://www.av-comparatives.org/about-us/
I may be wrong, but I can't find any info as to their sponsors other than universities and volunteer researchers.
And I'm not sure how that addresses what I said about Defender being borderline useless, because they come up short across most tests from what I remember.
Unless it has drastically improved in the last year.
At the time (2010ish), they even had a few reports where they showed that pretty much all the AV products were quite bad. Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
Those aren't mutually exclusive... ;-) Some things never change, I guess.
As a Windows admin who uses Unix-ish systems exclusively at home, I am a little clueless sometimes. When using AV software on our computers, I can at least point to that and say I did what I could (be reasonably expected to do), but whenever I read what people who really know about IT security have to say about the AV industry, I get the feeling it's all just a bunch of charlatans and snake oil peddlers.
But the latter is a little difficult to explain to my boss without sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic.
romanovcode implied that because AV tests are frequently sponsored by AV companies, that would somehow negate Defender's consistently poor results (which would make no sense, as it has poor results pretty much universally across different tests).
5.1 Deploy anti-virus software on all systems commonly affected by malicious software (particularly personal computers and servers).
Presumably unless the software was explicitly "deployed" (rather than being bundled with Windows), they don't feel like they are complying.
As long as code execution vulnerabilities in web browsers and common plugins (adobe, etc.) exist.. and they still do, 'drive-by downloading' will continue to spread malware, adware, and ransomware.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?can=1&q...
No license management needed.
a. Troyans aka "Letter from IRS" promising to jail you unless you open it. Yes, a lot of people still fall for that.
b. Browser vulns if you didn't update your browser and visit some weird sites.
c. Plugin vulns such as flash/java - a lot of content, esp. video, still requires flash.
Though I think most cybercrime moved on from old-fashioned viruses to botnets and ransomware (not strictly correct since I'm mixing delivery and monetization here but I hope you get what I mean), since you can make much more money with it. And given the frequency I read about those in the media, they are not rare at all.
http://support.kaspersky.com/answers#installerrors
Ctrl-F "Delete the files of the earlier installed product versions"
UPD Ah, it has an own page: https://support.kaspersky.com/common/service.aspx?el=1464