The Truth About Microsoft Defender

Windows Defender got a bad rap. In reality, a fully-patched PC running Windows Defender is one of the most secure platforms in the world today. But it is included as a freebie, to the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 10, and a freebie can’t ever be good, can it?

Well, Microsoft decided to upgrade Windows Defender, rebranding it as Microsoft Defender (the included one) and Microsoft 365 Defender (the paid one), and the result is a beast.

This new version is not free, (well, there is the really good free version that comes with Windows), but properly configured, this new version is included with Microsoft 365 Business Premium (a more secure version of Office 365) and what it can do is amazing to keep you safe. You can only get it two ways. Microsoft 365 Business Premium, and individual SKU. It is not included with Windows.

Prevent cross-domain attacks and persistence

The new Defender integrates with Microsoft 365 to automatically prevent threats from accessing your organization and stop attacks before they happen. This company-wide system can understand attacks and context across domains to eliminate lie-in-wait and persistent threats and protect against current and future breaches—all with help from Microsoft 365 Defender.

Single Pane of Glass

With the new management tools, you can view prioritized incidents in a single dashboard to reduce confusion, clutter, and alert fatigue. Use the automated investigation capabilities of Microsoft 365 Defender to spend less time on detection and response so you can focus on triaging critical alerts and responding to threats.

Auto-heal affected assets

It is simple to take care of routine and complex remediation with Microsoft 365 Defender. Detection, investigation, and response occur automatically at the domain level within each Microsoft 365 security product. From there, you can return affected assets to a safe state and automatically remediate seemingly isolated attacks across the organization.

Hunt threats across domains

You can search across all your Microsoft 365 data with Microsoft 365 Defender. It helps you leverage your organizational knowledge with custom queries, protecting your organization against internal threats, and developing custom detection and response tools for long-term protection.

Other things of note:

With Defender 365 you can:

• Manage and secure hybrid identities and simplify employee, partner, and customer access.
• Deliver preventive protection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response for endpoints.
• Get visibility, control data, and detect threats across cloud services and apps.
• Secure your email, documents, and collaboration tools with Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Reviews of Defender 365 from others:

• Check out Forrester’s
• Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms
• Mitre ATT&CK Evaluation
• Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Broker