Do I still need antivirus in 2026?

Traditional antivirus — the kind that pops up in the corner of your screen and asks if you want to run a scan — has essentially been solved. Microsoft Defender, which comes free with every Windows machine, is genuinely as good as most of the paid alternatives at spotting known bad files. If that's all you need protection against, you don't need to pay for anything extra.

The problem is that traditional antivirus isn't what modern attacks look like anymore.

What attacks actually look like now

The typical incident we're called to in 2026 doesn't involve a virus in the old sense. It looks more like this: someone gets a convincing phishing email, enters their Microsoft 365 password on a fake login page, and the attacker uses that valid login to sit in the mailbox for a fortnight, learn how the business works, and then send a fraudulent invoice to a customer or trigger a fake bank transfer. No file is ever downloaded. There's nothing for antivirus to scan.

Or it looks like this: a user clicks a bad link, a script runs in memory, and the attacker's tooling never touches the disk. Again, nothing for a file scanner to find.

What actually works

The category to look for is EDR — Endpoint Detection and Response. Instead of just scanning files, EDR watches how processes behave on the machine. If Word suddenly launches PowerShell, which launches a script that starts encrypting files, EDR notices the pattern and stops it, even if it's a brand-new attack nobody has ever seen before.

Most decent EDR products are also connected back to a Security Operations Centre — actual humans who look at alerts, decide which ones matter, and respond overnight when your team's asleep. That's the bit you're paying for. Not the software; the fact that somebody is watching it.

What we recommend for a UK small business

• Defender for Business (bundled with Microsoft 365 Business Premium) is a strong baseline if you're on 365 already.
• A managed EDR product (SentinelOne, Huntress, CrowdStrike Falcon Go, Sophos MDR) on top, monitored by a SOC.
• Multi-factor authentication on absolutely everything that touches the internet.
• DNS filtering to stop dodgy links resolving in the first place.
• Staff training so the phishing email is spotted before it becomes an incident.

Stack those together and you've closed off the routes attackers actually use. Skip them and rely on old-school antivirus and you're solving 2015's problem in 2026.