I am at a loss of words for how non-sensical this is.
It’s actually not.
Many laws and insurances require the use of anti-virus software. This is like a leftover from 20 years ago, where anti-virus actually did something. If you have a security breach and the insurance finds out you didn’t have any anti-virus, it’s not going to pay. So, for legal/liability reasons, company do need to install that kind of bullshit, even tho it’s not doing anything today.
For consumers, this is completely irrelevant, but for companies that want to offer linux as an OS for their employees, that is actually a nice thing to have.
Where is this?
I’ve worked in office space with computers, handling sensible data, and there wasn’t an anti-virus solution. Ever.
Most insurances I’ve worked with require those. This is not a country thing, but a company thing. My current business insurance requires them
By law, there is nothing thar REQUIRES it per se, but there is a set of rules and regulations where installing it is one way to fulfil the requirements. Especially NIS2 requires “appropriate cybersecurity risk-management measures”, so having a free anti-virus run on the system is one way to implement it, amongst other measures of course.
and there wasn’t an anti-virus solution
I’m not saying every company follows them. I’m just saying if something happens and they discover you’re not following certain regulations, you are in the big shitters and will be very likely held liable.
Not caring about security is fine as long as nothing happens.
you must have never worked in a corporate or enterprise environment.
I’m a security engineer and we work with this stuff daily. In fact most enterprise endpoint devices (laptops, phones, desktops) have not one but several security software by different vendors for different purposes.
Antivirus, firewall, proxy, VPN, monitoring, …
We have a small desktop farm environment and a handful of devs with Linux laptops, they all have defender installed.
Not really, Defender is quite popular as an EDR solution and a lot of companies love the pricing and logging of a modern EDR.
Defender with its timeline is also better than some of the alternatives I’ve seen in the field.
The pricing is garbage. The only benefit is the classic “unreasonable enterprise demands” (UED, that’s my term for it): Rather than use multiple tools that are each best in class (and possibly cheaper or even free!) enterprises will always choose one product that does all the things. Even if it does those things poorly or even worst-in-class.
Example: VMWare. For ages, enterprises used VMWare for all their VMs because it could run/manage both Windows and Linux VMs from a single tool. Even though HyperV for Windows is vastly superior for Windows VMs and KVM is vastly superior for Linux VMs.
Aside: Yes, you can run Linux on HyperV and Windows on KVM but neither are ideal.
Windows Defender as an EDR is OK-ish for Windows but it’ll never top CrowdStrike Falcon or SentinelOne Singularity for Linux. It probably won’t be better than FOSS alternatives like Cilium Tetragon or even Falco (because of their flexibility/customizable nature).
Edit: I also have a pretty firm belief that putting Windows people in charge of managing Linux systems (of any kind) is always a bad idea. Yet the very nature of the product (Microsoft Defender) insists upon this.
EEE in full effect.
I mean, if you’re insane you could pair this with Microsoft Edge for Linux
I’m going to get nightmares.
If this allows more companies to offer Linux as an option for employees workstations, or even instead of Windows, I’m fine with this. Obviously this is not something for consumers.
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit
This sounds like the type of stuff a company would require on their business laptops, so this might actually be a good thing for Linux adoption. Of course it sucks for people who were already using Linux for work and now gotta put up with this shit lol.
Defender on Linux desktops requires the standalone Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 or Microsoft 365 E5 and E7.
IDK. Defender had a good reputation when I still was on Windows, 8 years ago. It was non-intrusive and didn’t slow down the OS like other AV solutions. One good experience I had was when I dragged a zipped e-mail attachment to the desktop out of interest and Defender immediately quarantined it. Don’t understand the MS lingo in the text you quoted but yeah everything mentioning 365 sounds like a PITA. So maybe it’s BS now.
All I know now is that Windows Defender keeps causing problems with people trying to install Deus Ex Randomizer just because it’s an unpopular and unsigned program
Can’t wait to ignore it
Fuck, next will be teams
I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st
At least it’s accurately named. “Microsoft Defender” is designed to defend Microsoft from competitors. All those EU orgs switching to Linux are now just one short sales call to the right idiot away from falling back into Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Looooooooooool no
Is it at the very least vibe-coded slop (like the Epic Games Store)?
lol
lmao even
Cats and dogs living together, MASS HYSTERIA!
Hahaha… no. Never installing that.
If it’s easier to set up and work with than ClamAV I’m down to clown. I won’t put it on my personal machine, but I’ve got machines I use corpware on for work and school I wouldn’t mind having it on.
