Microsoft Brings Defender Antivirus for Linux, Coming Soon for Android and iOS

If this news hasn’t gotten you excited yet…

Microsoft is also planning to soon release Defender ATP
anti-malware apps for smartphones and other devices running
Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS mobile operating systems.

“We know our customers’ environments are complex and heterogeneous.
Providing comprehensive protection across multiple platforms
through a single solution and streamlined view is more important
than ever,” the company
said^[2].

“Next week at the RSA Conference, we’ll provide a preview of our
investments in mobile threat defense with the work we’re doing to
bring our solutions to Android and iOS.”

I am sure you might have heard this many times that ‘Linux
doesn’t need antivirus software,’ but this is not the case
anymore.

Despite the fact that the attack surface for Linux is much much
smaller, Linux has its own share of vulnerabilities and malware
threats, and you need proactive monitoring to keep your system
safe.

According to Microsoft, Defender ATP is a unified endpoint platform
for preventative protection, post-breach detection, automated
investigation, and response.

It proactively hunts across users, email, applications, and
endpoints to automatically detect, investigate, and stop
coordinated multi-point attacks.

“The AI capabilities built into Microsoft Security solutions are
trained on 8 trillion daily threat signals and the insights of
3,500 security experts. Custom algorithms and machine learning
models make, and learn from, billions of queries every day,” said
Ann
Johnson^[3], Corporate Vice
President of the Cybersecurity Solutions Group.

A timeline for when Microsoft would release the iOS and Android
versions have not been specified, although the company said it
would be available later this year.