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by qwerty456127 1793 days ago
MS Windows Defender is generally good (I actually prefer it and preferred its SecurityEssentials predecessor to all the other antiviruses) but seems really notorious in removing non-virus "threats". It also removes NirSoft (and some Sysinternals IIRC) utilities regularly. Yesterday, trying to download the recent version of LibreOffice, I have even found found out I have no qBitTorrent installed any more - it killed it also. I really wish I could just put a regex filter to bulk-allow some classes of "threats" ("HackTool:" and "PUA:") permanently.
3 comments

I don't know if my installation is broken, but I haven't had Defender remove what I thought was a legitimate binary since I first installed Windows 10. Literally not one single time on half a dozen installations.

FWIW I installed and ran qBitTorrent recently and it didn't complain.

> I haven't had Defender remove what I thought was a legitimate binary

Probably because you are closer to a "typical" kind of user who doesn't use "hack tools" (which some people like me use for absolutely legal and benevolent purposes "hacking" their own PC, e.g. to backup the passwords and e-mail records saved on it). By the way it also is very important to distinguish between a legitimate hack tool and an infected hack tool and I am not sure they do.

> I installed and ran qBitTorrent recently and it didn't complain.

They just added a slightly old version to their threats database and didn't add the most recent version there yet.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/qBittorrent/comments/lwqjm9/qbitbor...

I just checked, perhaps the fact that I have "reputation-based" blocking always disabled helps, which seems to avoid that kind of false positive. I am not a fan of my OS phoning home to check every single executable I run. Either it's in the virus database, or I'm tech-savvy enough not to run any .exe I receive via e-mail.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/32236-enable-disable-mic...

I didn't even know there is such a "reputation" option. Today Windows configuration windows are way harder to find anything (what you don't already know is there/where) in than they used to be even in Windows 7, let alone XP (where everything was way more intuitive and easy to discover). As for submitting the files to Microsoft - I believe I have disabled that but in the today context I can't be sure it didn't get enabled on itself.
I disagree that it is good. It was good. But now it is indistinguishable from a malware. It regularly takes 100% CPU, it prevents many of my own apps from running, and if you switch off real-time protection it switches itself back on like any respectable rootkit.
Use Deluge. The best IMO.