For anyone who has been missing Microsoft’s tender, loving embrace since switching to Linux. Copilot for Linux is in development, I presume.

This is like poking holes in the condom before visiting the nearest $20 brothel...

It's perfect for them. They don't have to do the work of maintaining an OS (Which they suck at) and get to continue monitoring the entire computer using their malwa- I mean security suite. :)

It's to meet compliance regulations for orgs leveraging linux with E5/E7 licenses already. I doubt they even publish a version your average user can license, and it's probably just an attempt to further entrench orgs into E5/E7, perpetual money drip into the Microslop money tank.

As useful as nipples on a truck.

Well this is bullshit. I guess I will end up with this on my work laptop because almost everything is Microsoft in that environment. I can only hope it stays the hell out of the way.

I'm surprised the requirements isn't "To use Microsoft defender you need TPM version 2.0 or newer"

Well, even though Microsoft Defendet was one of the better products they had, making all the anti-virus-software obsolete, I would still not dream of installing it on my linux, where I have a totally different security model by default, only for MS to gather data for free.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is just the beginning. Microsoft is making its tools Linux-compatible and is quietly, turning Windows into a desktop environment for the Linux kernel. They probably don't even need to tell their users about it. Surprise, WSL is everywhere now!

Thanks, but no thanks.

Why is the first paragraph repeated? Written by AI?

To quote Shoresy: "For WHAT‽"

The more Linux gets support the more likely is that it gets used more and is allowed on more companies. I dont want windoes defender on my linux device but I still think this is a good step for linux in general

Next up: Microsoft Linux with crap like Game Center.

Crucial distinction: this is specifically for enterprise developer workstations under corporate management (requiring Defender for Endpoint / M365 enterprise licenses), not a general release for all Linux users.

I wrote a bit about what this means for the compliance versus privacy tug-of-war over on my site: Microsoft Defender Arrives on Linux Workstations.

Definitely an interesting shift for mixed-stack environments.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

Lmao is it April 1st already? This is so fucking funny to me

What the fuck?

Microsoft is like a plague.
They spot something with potential and immediately pounce on it. That's exactly how it went with GitHub too. And now they're trying to insert themselves into Linux. Probably just to harvest data. Complete bullshit. I would never use that.

Isn’t this mostly for enterprises that have linux on notebooks or VDIs, just so that all of their OS types are in the same ecosystem when it comes to attack surface management (ie in Sentinel)?

Ew, what? No

This is really showing that Linux is on its way to be plagued by lots of corporate crap. What surprises me though is that the OS comunity has not come up with a FOSS solution that does what MS Defender does? I'm no programmer so i may be talking out of context. Why do i need to think that my out of the box Debian machine is more vulnerable than MicroSoft Windows.? Time to move to BSD?

I think I'll stick to Wazuh 😂

I just want a real security solution for Linux that's privacy respecting and not the NSA in a trenchcoat (aka M$) but that's too much to ask. The offerings for advanced security on Windows are better than those on Linux for desktop use (we're not talking server) and it's not even close. Secure enough for most people is nice. But it's not enough for the paranoid like me and I desperately want it to be.

Defender has a very good thing in its configurable hard mode that simply blocks new executables that have never been seen before by M$'s cloud data. That stops pretty hard and fast a lot of new in the wild malware including campaigns by sophisticated actors. Combine with good management of LOLbins and a lockdown on those and you have a pretty hardened machine. The issue is it isn't private because it's sending M$ a complete list of hashes of every file on your machine which they pass to the NSA I'm sure. That and Windows itself being NSA-malware you know.