Is Microsoft Defender good enough in 2024? (2024)

In years gone by, you were crazy if you used a Windows machine without an anti-virus. Microsoft Defender was a passable-at-best firewall and that's about it, whereas even free anti-virus programs would run rings around Microsoft's own first-party option that's built into Windows. Nowadays that's no longer quite the case, and for most people, I'd argue that Microsoft Defender is more than good enough.

Microsoft Defender used to be terrible

Marred by experiences with older Windows versions, it's come a long way

Image credit: Microsoft

Years ago, Microsoft Defender was in a rough place. Primarily around the era of Windows Vista and Windows 7, relying on Microsoft Defender was a poor choice. The market for free and paid anti-viruses boomed, and Defender was marred by its initial marketing as a standalone dubbed Microsoft AntiSpyware to be used with Windows XP. It was a long road to recover from there, even after the huge amount of investment the company made in acquiring anti-virus companies in the early 2000s.

Even in Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft Defender held a reputation for being a terrible anti-virus. However, the turnaround began with Windows 8 and continued significantly into Windows 10 and later versions. The introduction of Windows 8 marked a turning point, where Microsoft started to integrate Defender more deeply into the operating system itself, enhancing its capabilities and ensuring it was enabled by default to provide continuous protection.

Why Microsoft Defender is good now

A combination of differing incentives and the cloud

Microsoft has different incentives for users who use Defender, and those incentives align with making users comfortable. If a user purchases a computer running Windows, they don't want constant pop-ups and reminders telling them that their computer is vulnerable to X or Y threats. However, an anti-virus provider benefits greatly from you seeing those pop-ups, as it may push you to purchase a license or a subscription.

Think of it this way: if you're AVG and you know your free anti-virus is installed on people's computers, you want to make them feel insecure so that they purchase your product. Why wouldn't you? If there's a perceived imminent threat, the user will want to upgrade and pay for protection against that threat. On the contrary, Microsoft only wants to show you problems if they truly are problems, because they don't benefit from the perception of Windows being insecure in the same way that a company like AVG might.

On top of that, Microsoft Defender is now a part of Microsoft 365, meaning that companies and big businesses actually pay for its use. There's a lot of incentive to get it right in a non-invasive way, and that's where Cloud Protection comes in. According to AV-Comparatives, there's a pretty big difference between Defender with Cloud Protect on and Cloud Protect off.

Cloud Protection is a big part of Microsoft's defenses, and it allows the company to identify new and emerging threats in real time and immediately build defenses to recognize them. Your computer continuously updates from the cloud with signatures of new threats so that it can detect them, and it does it in the background in a way that's optimized to work with Windows, rather than on top of Windows.

You should enable Defender on your Windows PC

It's really easy to do it

Microsoft Defender is on by default on Windows, but if you switch it off, you can easily switch it back on.

1. Open the Windows Security app.
2. Click Virus & threat protection on the main menu or the left-side pane.
3. Under Virus & threat protection settings, click Manage settings.
4. Make sure the toggle under Real-time protection to On.

That's it! You'll now have Defender enabled and protecting your PC.