Is there any anti-virus beyond the built-in that's actually worth using?

I've run nothing but Windows Defender on my own machines, and haven't had any issue since before Windows XP.

On the other hand, I've had to use a whole host of shit under duress at work, and all I've ever seen it do is slow beefy desktops to a crawl, delete parts of various dev tools, and fight over who can lock and scan files. Now they are tied into sketchy cloud services that require creating logins, and are getting themselves hacked.

For home use, Windows Defender is fine, and you really don't need a third-party AV.

For businesses it's Defender ATP, which looks about the same as every other AV/EDR product. Haven't personally used it so no comment, other than their Linux support doesn't look great right now.

What slows down endpoints is usually shitty security engineering, and multiple pieces of security software doing essentially the same thing (my company uses three different monitoring tools which all hash executables). 9 times out of 10 you can blame some manager in your security team who bought unnecessary endpoint security software to cover their ass after they listened to a bullshit sales pitch.

The title is misleading, it was not hacked. There was an detected attempt, but it was mitigated.

The original title is: “ Avast fights off cyber-espionage attempt, Abiss”

However, there is an unclear statement in the blog post on whether there was in fact a successful hack or a failed attempt:

“When analyzing the external IPs, we found that the actor had been attempting to gain access to the network through our VPN as early as May 14 of this year.

After further analysis, we found that the internal network was successfully accessed with compromised credentials through a temporary VPN profile that had erroneously been kept enabled and did not require 2FA.“

Seems like the internal Avast network was _compromised_, but not the products itself.