I have come up with a situation in which an installed antivirus is not detected by wmic or it's equivalent cmdlet. The system where I am having this issue is a windows server 2016 and the antivirus is SEP (Symantec Endpoint Protection)
While doing some research I have found two possible explanations for this, but as far as I understood, these answers are pretty different, actually could even be complementary. Since I am a newcomer to WMI I would like some clarification about them.
The command I am using for retrieving the information is:
wmic /NAMESPACE:\\root\SecurityCenter2 path antivirusproduct GET ...
The first explanation1 I found is that the antivirusproduct class is not defined in server versions of windows which fits my problem since my machine is a windows server and I have tried the same command on a Win10 machine and it works.
The second explanation2 talks about the fact that in order to detect the antivirus through WMI it has to be registered on the Windows Security Center.
Having said that the main questions are:
Is the antivirusprocut class defined by the Windows Security Center provider, actually, does WSC have a WMI provider. If not which WMI provider is defining this class. I have been looking at the list of providers in the reference documentation3 and there doesn't seem to be a provider defining this so I assume this must be set by a provider coming from a third party software, hence the guess about WSC.
Regardless of the provider why would a class be defined on windows desktop versions and not on a server ones.
Any clarification is appreciated.
1 Detecting anti-virus on Windows with WMI - which namespace?
2 https://support.moonpoint.com/os/windows/commands/wmic/determine-antivirus.php
3 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/wmi-providers
