Asked by @ajsnonsense: Should I use Norton or move to Defender?

This is one of those questions that can be answered in an edgy way historically 1, turns out to be simple in practice 2, and at broad scale is very complex 3.

1.) Those out of practice will tell you Defender sucks. But it doesn't anymore. Ignore them.
2.) Those talking practically will say absolutely use Defender. Make sure you're on the latest Windows build with Tamper protection enabled and your "Win10 privacy tool" didn't unknowingly disable half the protection features through ignorant choices, and you have a super-powerful solution for free. And they are right. That's what I do.
3.) Defender for home users is great, but intractably could do more because it is cuffed by the requirements it work perfectly without much user input across a billion devices, and that attackers will always test against it even if it can adapt quickly via cloud. [I AM TALKING CONSUMER ONLY THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO DEFENDER ATP OR CUSTOMIZED ENTERPRISE STUFF LIKE ASR GROUP POLICY]
Some third-party vendors have their own very novel and more noisy approaches to try to differentiate themselves from this free offering. I won't get in that here.

tl;dr I would not use anything bundled in a computer, I use Defender, but also do not discount unique approaches others can bring to the table โ€“ and if you make an informed choice, I support that.

This is the kind of thing you can't say in 280 characters.

The fact is you can reasonably run a modern Windows system without any antivirus at all. Normal user operations just browsing the web have never been safer.
But when you start having users unfamiliar with Windows quirks opening email attachments, getting redirected to sites because they don't have an adblocker, tricked into fake updates.

That's where antivirus saves your ass. It can monitor for failure and respond to it. It acts as a partial backstop to many other layers failing. That SHOULD be its job. If antivirus ever gets a legitimate detection, that is a huge series of failures to make it to your box.

It's easy to be edgy on this topic. Nuance appears pudgy.

@SwiftOnSecurity Taking local admin privs away from those that don't need them also helps reduce virus outbreaks.
@clankgy1 @SwiftOnSecurity It's a *lot* of work to get an environment to a place where that won't consume a massive fraction of your support resources, though.

@AGTMADCAT @SwiftOnSecurity Agreed. And what is interesting to me at least is that the people that claim to need local admin rights the most are the ones most likely to get phished, surf questionable sites (mostly porn), and engage in other shenanigans.

Can't speak for others, but local admin rights became an huge organizational political battle.

(but one worth fighting)

@clankgy1 @AGTMADCAT @SwiftOnSecurity At a place that shall go unnamed, corp IT locked down developer laptops with Windows without local admin, and all the devs who needed to Get Stuff Doneโ„ข did it on personal laptops and desktops running #Linux.

In corp ITโ€™s defence, though, their actions actually increased the security posture of the organisation by getting devs to use Linux!

@ankitpati @clankgy1 @AGTMADCAT @SwiftOnSecurity OK, I chuckled.

There are plenty of folks who do better with local admin powers, and who should just be allowed to run Linux.
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