Microsoft Defender. The epochal product that appeared together with a breakthrough Windows version – Vista¹. Through the years, it was known as a useless tool that cannot protect your system even from the simplest viruses. Times have changed, and old problems are gone. But the Defender is still a non-grata for its users. Why? Let’s figure that out.

Is Microsoft Defender necessary?

I don’t want to touch the dark past of the Defender. Here it is if you can even imagine the worst period for any software product. If the product has such a bad image, it will likely just be discontinued in any other company. However, Microsoft stood at the need for an integrated security tool for their operating system. And they finally made one that looks like something normal and usable. But, unfortunately, it only looks like.

Defender appears to be a pretty good security solution when it comes to proactive security, or zero-trust protection. But the main problem is far away from these complicated terms. Besides being very effective in high-technology activities, this antivirus program struggles to do its job properly on demand². And it is the saddest thing – even the old versions of the Defender (from the times when it was called “Microsoft Security Essentials”) were able to perform these actions without any problems.

What’s wrong with the Microsoft Defender?

This security tool has a lot of disadvantages, but most of them are not so crucial. Moreover, the developers attempted to fix these problems in the large update – Windows 11. Unfortunately, small fixes crushed something on the other side of the program, making it useless. In Windows 10, without all these high-end out-of-box things like Microsoft Defender for Endpoints or ASR, it was at least capable of scanning. In Windows 11, you will surely fail to scan your device for threats. Instead, you will see the scan hung at each attempt after a random period. Sometimes, it fails even to start the scan.

Less annoying bugs and “features” are present there, too. In most Windows systems that are currently active, you can suspend Defender in just several commands. And malware developers know that – and use that as often as possible. Most of the malware injections nowadays start from suspending the Defender – even if it is a “stealthy” script-based malware. In Windows 11, things became better – it is impossible to stop it through these commands. But there are still several security breaches that allow us to perform this trick and forget about this “full-featured and extremely effective antivirus”.

Another bug that caused me to curse the Defender is the hanging detections. When you press “Remove” while choosing the action for a certain threat, there is a chance that the program will do nothing. Again – you click “Remove”, Defender asks for your allowance through UAC – and nothing happens. You keep spectating malware in Microsoft Defender Security Center, and not only there. The detected virus files remain in their directory, and thank you, Gates, that the detected malware is at least blocked.