Windows Defender can now run in a sandbox

Via the Microsoft Security Blog:

Windows Defender Antivirus has hit a new milestone: the built-in antivirus capabilities on Windows can now run within a sandbox. With this new development, Windows Defender Antivirus becomes the first complete antivirus solution to have this capability and continues to lead the industry in raising the bar for security.

Sandboxes isolate processes in such a way as to prevent them from causing systemic harm, and because of the way modern antiviruses work, many of them have proven vulnerable to targeted arbitrary code execution attacks -- that's right, proof-of-concept malware exists that can exploit the antivirus suite! This is a major step toward improving the security of the Windows platform, and as far as I can tell, Defender is the first in its class to adopt this sort of fortification.

Right now, It's not set up by default. I'd imagine that may change in the near future.

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.

Free Antiviruses

I'm not a huge proponent of anti-virus. It's not that I think I won't get one. It's just that I'm usually running an OS that's not a big target for viruses. I can't even list one AV tool specifically for OS X, BSD or Linux, but I'm sure something exists. I just stick with NoScript and RequestPolicy on FireFox to keep the browser malware at bay.

With Windows 7, I figured it might be time to look into AV if for no other reason rhan to get rid of the nagging system tray icon warning me that my computer might be at risk. Then, just today, Keith posted a list of free AV solutions for Windows. I went with MS Security Essentials. It stays out of the way for the most part from what I've seen, but it's not like I've tried pulling up a bunch of Russian Serialz, Crax & w4r3z sites or any crap like that -- A move I'd consider to be asking for trouble.

I know plenty of readers are Windows users, by choice or by force (employer?)

What have you had the best luck with? What other anti-malware tools are you using for yourself or for others who already hosed their systems up?