Antivirus software has been a staple investment for protecting enterprise and consumer endpoints alike from cyberthreats. As these attacks have evolved from sending funny messages across the screen of your personal desktop to now holding entire organizations to ransom with the click of a button, a traditional, signature-based approach is no longer good enough to detect and respond to modern day threats.
Today Microsoft is pleased to announce that AV-TEST has awarded Microsoft Best Advanced Protection 2022 for both Corporate Users and Consumer Users categories. After a year of extensive lab evaluations made up of live testing and step by step in special attack scenarios, such as ransomware, we are honored that AV-TEST has recognized Microsoft Defender AV for its exceptional performance against malware.
Figure 1 – Best Advanced Protection 2022 for Corporate and Consumer Users awarded to Microsoft Defender AV
To combat the evolving threat landscape, Microsoft transformed what we once knew as antivirus by supercharging it for the next generation. These innovations resulted in advanced detection engines carefully tuned by Microsoft’s world class threat research organization to provide an endpoint security solution for all platforms including macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and Windows. By fueling these client and cloud capabilities with 65 trillion daily signals curated from Microsoft’s global portfolio of products and services, Microsoft Defender AV provides the best level of protection for organizations and consumers looking to stay protected from sophisticated threats, as attested by the most recent awards from AV-Test.
During the announcement, Andreas Marx, CEO of AV-TEST had this to say about Microsoft Defender AV:
"When it comes to ransomware, Microsoft seems to have developed a special strength. The quite new Advanced Threat Protection tests extend far beyond classic detection. Not every provider was able to handle the extended attacks, mostly through ransomware, in the 2022 tests. That's why the AV-TEST Institute was pleased to present the two important consumer user and corporate user awards for Best Advanced Protection 2022 to Microsoft."
Read the full announcement from AV-TEST
Securing endpoints and beyond
The importance of a holistic endpoint security strategy goes far beyond antivirus capabilities. With more devices connected to the corporate network than ever before and thousands of cybersecurity jobs left unfilled each year, organizations require an endpoint solution that allows security teams to confidently detect and respond to even the most advanced threats without overextending their staff and resources. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities that tackle these challenges and empower security teams to achieve more while focusing on the incidents that matter most. Defender for Endpoint can also help security teams scale their efforts, by investigating and remediating threats using our fully automated, multi-stage approach that mirrors the methodologies of real-world security analysts.
For organizations looking to expand their security capabilities beyond endpoint workloads, Microsoft 365 Defender combines our best-of-breed endpoint, identity, email, and cloud app security products into an end-to-end XDR solution. It enables organizations to respond more effectively with prioritized incidents, disrupts attacks automatically, and provides detections using industry-leading threat intelligence.