Defender vs. Norton

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Just curious, have any of you explored the differences between Windows Defender and Norton antivirus? Does defender hold a candle? I’ve read great things (from Woody) about the potential for defender to be all you need, just wondering if anyone would like to add to that? Thanks!

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I’ve beta testing windows defender as a far back as before it had its name and was put into Vista. I’d say it has serious shortcomings in terms of blocking exploits, behavior recognition, and performance (those come to mind at the moment). The update interface in windows 10(1709) makes it almost impossible to review what has been detected/blocked and removed. You not only want to block bad stuff, but know when and how it happened.  I’ve heard (indirectly) that the limited periodic scan triggers (intentionally?) other antiviruses to do a full system scan more than once a day.

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Slightly off-topic:  I have had two or three bad experiences with Norton, as follows:

I used to develop certain specialised desktop applications (intended for only one or perhaps two users).  Norton acquired a habit of letting me compile and link and test my application, get ready to burn onto CD-ROM for delivery (this was some years ago), and then Norton would erase the executable, on the grounds that no-one else in the world was using it and therefore “the Norton Community view was that it must be dangerous”.  [Anything may be done, but nothing may be done for the first time.]  This problem may not affect many people, true.  My customers all used Avast anti-virus, which was quite happy with my products.

Much more seriously: Norton started to decrypt my https traffic, and to re-encrypt it with its own certificate and keys.  Their excuse was that they wanted to support me by saving my passwords in one safe place.  Excuse me? I do not want Norton to know my bank password at all: that’s the point of https.  Fortunately, Firefox detected that inbound traffic arrived encrypted with a certificate which didn’t match the domain name, and reported a “man in the middle attack” — which is true enough.  If Norton say “the man in the middle is really us”, then that completely hides a possible actual man-in-the-middle attack.

Oh and Norton’s automatic updating schedule consumed all my network bandwidth and all my CPU clocks for about 10 minutes every 15 minutes.

Up with this I will not put.

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Hmm, I’ve used Norton for a long time and I’ve never encountered the certificate issue, in fact Norton specifically doesn’t do that. I do know that avast specifically DOES mess with certificates to decrypt SSL traffic (Norton deals with the traffic after the browser decrypts it internally/normally). I don’t use their password manager.

As for being a low volume software developer, you will need to disable scanning/reputation checking for your build directory and submit your (very low volume) release builds as a false positive.

As to performance, I’ve seen Norton (last ~3 years as an example) perform well on a system with decent (but old) specs. Now if you are running on a 1 watt atom processor or have less than 1GB of ram you will have performance issues. I’m not sure how it could be using all your network, the last 3 day’s daily network usage average to update Norton for me was 6 MB. Largest recent update I have seen was 100 MB followed shortly by a 50 MB update. That’s a one hour update on the slowest of DSL.

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I have been using Norton Premium 5-10 computers for about 10 yrs. I never heard of the messes you have had!  I have NEVER HAD to save my passwords to Norton.  Although, there is a vault segment that one can do that if one wants to.  I use the same Norton Premium download or Hard copy on 4 or 5 different computers.  Last year the one software for 5-10 computers costs me $59.95.  Never have I had any trouble. My main computer runs Windows 7 SP1  x64 and 8GB Ram and 1TB HHD

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On your original topic , periodically during each year I can get Norton Premium and Defenber to run at the same time!!  I don’t know how I did it but both were doing there jobs. for the most part the two will NOT run together.when that happens Defender losses and shuts down, goes to orange the to red.

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There is a rumor that the “limited periodic scanning” of defender triggers other antiviruses to do a full system scan multiple times a day.

If it is a bug, fine, BUT if windows defender is starting a commandline scan for another antivirus to run a full scan multiple times per day to make them look bad…

On the last windows 10 computer I worked on (windows 10 isn’t allowed on MY computers) I just disabled all parts of windows defender and was done with it. (It can’t make up its mind if it is disabled for Norton or me — either way it doesn’t run)

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ok I make very simple
if you’re using your computer with brain
then windows defender is more that enough
if you’re not using your brain
and you downloading files from questionable sources
then get bitdefender and scan your pc with malwarebytes
every times you finish to download & install something on your pc

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