Recently in March 2019, Microsoft has changed its antivirus from Windows Defender to Microsoft Defender. That time, no one has the insight that Microsoft is doing this to bring its in-house antivirus to the Linux Operating Systems.
In the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference, the company is going to give a live demo on the usefulness of Microsoft Defender for Linux Security for keeping it protected against any kind of threat. Not just Linux, but the company also made it available for Enterprise Mac computers with the help of Microsoft Defender console.
The vice president of Microsoft M365 Security has announced that users will be able to use Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) by 2020. He said, “It’s coming in preview first, but when you get an untrusted document with potentially malicious macros via email, it will open in a container.”
After the introduction of Windows Defender, Linux will emerge as a more secure operating system and level up to battle with cyber attackers.
Apart from Defender antivirus, Microsoft is also planning to launch an “Application Guard.” It’s a new upcoming feature for high security. With this feature, you can open a webpage in an isolated virtual machine to protect it them malware. It is also a security feature to work with office 365 documents. With the launch of Microsoft defender, users will be able to protect the system from phishing and malicious activities.
Lefferts said “Defenders have to know everything perfectly and attackers only need to know one thing kind of well. The point is, it’s not a level playing field and it’s getting worse.”
It’s built into Defender ATP, Office 365, and Azure. We have signals built into events, behaviors, and things as simple as a user logged on to a machine or as complicated as the behavior of the memory layout in Word on this device is different to what it normally looks like,” Lefferts further explained.
Due to this effort by Microsoft, it will protect more than 13.5 billion emails protected against malicious emails. Lefferts said, “There’s a kill chain that represents every step an attacker takes as they move through the organization. When you find that going on, you want to ensure that you clean up the whole thing.”
That’s not all about the latest updates from Microsoft. The company has unveiled the new Edge browser for Linux based on Chromium.
The newly announced antivirus of Microsoft has a lot of features like exploit protection, reputation, and Network protection which are extremely helpful for Linux Security researchers.
Although in the past few years, Linux has shown vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber attackers but the situation is expected to improve after Microsoft Defender ATP. As of now, not much of the details are given about the antivirus by the company. Probably we have to wait for 2020 when it will finally be available for use.
