Players of the Redmond drinking game will be delighted to spot the acronym 'AI' in the announcement of the technology as an aid to identify nefarious activity. 'It's constantly monitoring the configuration and the settings of the device and when it sees that there is anything that is a known threat or a known vulnerability that is exposed, it automatically brings that to the attention of IT and IT can take automated action on that to clean it.'

Dubbed 'Threat and Vulnerability Management', the tech is geared up to scan the endpoints of an organisation and flag up weaknesses.Īnderson told us that technology was agentless (Defender having been built into the operating system for a while now). The Defender ATP team has also pushed out to preview additional technology to deal with known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that can be exploited by miscreants. The newly renamed Microsoft Defender ATP is available for macOS now in a limited preview. After all, once you're paying for Office, what's a little extra anti-malware between friends? The latter also enjoys quite a bit of love in the Apple community, according to one enterprise specialist we spoke to.Īs part of Microsoft's ongoing effort to move beyond Windows with the likes of Microsoft 365, it is extending this protection to other operating systems, starting with macOS.

A report by Statista put AVAST as the number one Windows anti-malware application vendor followed by Malwarebytes. To be fair, in my experience, Windows Defender is far less of a resource hog than the products of certain other vendors, although customers have plenty of choice.

Microsoft defender