Windows Defender Antivirus Now Run Within a Sandbox To Isolate the Advanced Threats

Microsoft has moved ahead into a new milestone for its Windows Defender Antivirus and now it is running within Sandbox environment in order to isolate the malicious actions to protect the system.

Microsoft offers Windows Defender as an inbuilt Antivirus for Windows users to protect various cyber threat and protect from critical cyber attacks.

This new future offered by the result of analyzing it from the various security industry and the research community by running Windows Defender Antivirus in a restrictive process execution environment.

Microsoft believes that it was the right investment and the next step in our innovation journey and requested users to test this future and provide the feed to finetune this future and functionality.

Windows Defender Antivirus Sandbox Future

Inbuilt Windows Defender Antivirus always running within the operating system within high privilege environment that contains so many risks from emerging threats.

Previously known attacks are continuously targeting Windows Defender Antivirus and windows security research team immediately fix it and always hardening windows along with general attacks.

Running Windows Defender Antivirus in Sandbox allow let sophisticated malware and other malicious actions are running in an isolated environment.

This protection ensures the high security for the windows users and this is part of Microsoft’s continued investment to stay ahead of attackers through security innovations.

Sandbox Implementation

First Major effort of this future is layering Windows Defender Antivirus’s inspection capabilities that provides a complete privilege and every testing components must run under the sandbox environment.

Microsoft says The goal for the sandboxed components was to ensure that they encompassed the highest risk functionality like scanning untrusted input, expanding containers, and so on.

In order to focus on the performance issue since the antivirus products need to take a lot of processes to inspect file operations and processing and aggregating or matching large numbers of runtime events.

“To balance this process, In this Sandbox future minimize the number of interactions between the sandbox and the privileged process, and at the same time, only perform these interactions in key moments where their cost would not be significant, for example, when IO is being performed.”

Files will be running in a Sandbox environment in read-only at runtime since there are some potential risk involved at runtime cost of passing data/content between the processes also to avoid duplication and preserve strong security guarantee.

Enable sandboxing for Windows Defender Antivirus Users can also force the sandboxing implementation to be enabled by setting a machine-wide environment variable (setx /M MP_FORCE_USE_SANDBOX 1) and restarting the machine. This is currently supported on Windows 10, version 1703 or later.

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