Is there a native Antivirus running on my Windows 10 build?

KasunL said:

I'm not sure yet. I have to read more about the new features on newer builds. In fact, I have disabled the auto-updates via Group policy, and using wumt to manually install stuff that I think I need.

I am sorry to say but if you do not even know how to tell if Defender is running, disabling autoupdates is an incredibly silly thing to do. You say you install things you think you need but you have no idea of what you ACTUALLY need from a security perspective.

Why do you think MS introduced forced updates - far too many people were getting infected pcs because they blocked updates and MS were getting flak because of this even though it was not their fault. One thing is an absolute certainty - forced updates have significantly reduced virus infections.



The wannacry attack a couple of years back proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the importance of keeping up to date. Users on Windows 10 who kept up to date were immune.

In your case, I would clean install latest version (as you have no idea what else lurking on your pc), and change all key passwords online.

Paranoid? Perhaps but can you afford to take the risk of hackers exploiting security holes that have been plugged on later versions? I know I certainly cannot.

KasunL said:

Win version 1809

Hi all.

So, I cannot find Windows Defender on my Windows build. Is it that it's running in the background, but I cannot manually set security options? When I disable to test it out, the Windows Security Center just notifies me that there are no Antivirus running. Though I have encountered some suspicious programs and the OS just blocked running them gratefully. So, again the question, is there Windows Defender running on my build?

Hope my question makes sense, and thanks for reading.

Open Powershell (with admin rights) and type:

Code:

Get-MpPreference

It will give you all the information you need. Check the lines that start with "Disabled"

Then, you can get Configure Defender. You can set all there:

ConfigureDefender is a portable application, no installation is needed. Download and run the executable ConfigureDefender.exe - the application can be run both on Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit.

Updating to the latest version would be wise