2026 Security Checkup: Bad Medicine ⭐️

Sometimes I'll see a terrible headline in a news feed in the morning, cringe, and try to avoid viewing the offending article that lies beneath. Sometimes, that strategy is successful. Sometimes, however, it is not, and I will see that headline enough times that I push back my inner warnings and take a look. Which I then regret immediately.

Such was the case with I've Tested Every Major Antivirus. Please Don't Rely on Just Microsoft Defender. It's written by industry veteran Neil J. Rubenking, so my kneejerk reactions were trust and respect, which provided a nice counterbalance to my equally kneejerk worries about that headline.

And then I read it.

And holy crap, this is among the worst advice I've ever read. It is absolutely indefensible at every step along the way.

And I write that with the following self-awareness: In the same sense that I am not a financial expert and yet felt compelled to write From the Editor’s Desk: Conspiracy Theory ⭐️, I am not a security expert, and yet I feel compelled to opine on security, most recently through this 2026 series of articles. In both cases, I approach the topic from a life experience, "school of hard knocks" perspective. I've been around the block, so to speak, to the tune of 30+ years in this industry and I not perfect. But I've seen things, and I have some thoughts.

And my thoughts include the following.

The author seems to be commingling and mistaking Windows Defender, which is free and built into Windows 11, with Microsoft Defender, which is a part of the subscription-based paid Microsoft 365 offerings. It's clear he means Windows Defender, however. Probably.

You can rely entirely on [Windows] Defender, at least for system-level protection in Windows 11, and you can do so because you're being secure in other ways everywhere else.

You do not need third-party antivirus, free or paid.

And you most certainly don't need a security suite, for the love of God, any more than you need another hole in your head.

Naturally, I have to defend this rather extreme position. But that's OK. I can do so. Here are the claims with my responses.
Defender doesn't manage multiple devices
"[A Microsoft blog post about Microsoft Defender] does admit that you might need a third-party antivirus “if you manage multiple devices.” This is 2026. Do you know anyone who doesn’t manage multiple devices? At the very least, you surely have a PC (or a Mac!) and a smartphone. Sorry, Defender won’t do a thing for that phone or Mac."

Right. And thank God for that: Our smartphones are built to be secure out of the box, in fact, that security is one of the justifications for mobile app store junk fees.

But my big issue here is that we need to be "managing" multiple devices. Yes, we all have several devices of whatever kinds, but the days of "managing" them as if we were some kind of mini-IT department are long past and it was never a good idea to begin with. What we need is security that just works...