There's a hidden feature in Defender, that will delight any user : it can turn your 15" MacBook Pro into a full breakfast machine. Want pancakes ? Start a zoom call.
While you wait for your favorite video conference app to start, don't hope to finish your docker pull/save/build in less than 30 times its usual time. Your laptop I/O will be so cripled that you might get better bandwith with a floppy disk drive (I'm exagerating a bit, but that's how it feels to go from 120MB/s to 4MB/s on a SSD).
Our Mac IT is completely powerless. I never thought I would ever regret getting rid of Symantec. I was wrong.
To not interfere with the user there allegedly is a group policy setting to limit the CPU usage and it is set to 15%. The thing is, it simply does not work. Every week my fans spin up to max, Defender hogs all my CPU cores, 25% of my GPU according to the Task Manager. Even typing becomes laggy.
The only way to stop it is to open Task Scheduler and end the scheduled task from there.
When looking in Task Manager before, it seemed that Symantec used more CPU than even Visual Studio and related processes.
A common practice is to exclude both the whole repo and the compiler from Defender.
The tradeoff is not worth it, in my professional opinion.
Two worst offenders are:
- Antivirus: Just hogs memory, the scan runs "throughout the day" and I've had to resort to using scripts to shut the thing down just so my code will compile.
- Other annoying features: Lets make you stare at a dayglow green wallpaper and give you no way to change it to something that doesn't offend your eyes, lets place a bunch of icons on your dock and desktop that you can't get rid of, just bookmarks to common apps. Lets also make a popup show up on your laptop every day to remind you that you need to upgrade to OneDrive but forget to give me the permission to actually upgrade so this message repeats itself and fails every time..
endrant.
It's a scourge.
FWIW I installed and ran qBitTorrent recently and it didn't complain.
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...
In general, the desktop antivirus space in 2021 is a mess. Because of the sheer number of malware, and some obfuscation techniques used by some of it, antivirus software has to use very broad regular expressions for describing the malware, counterbalanced by huge whitelists of known mainstream software.
If you don't qualify as a "mainstream software vendor", simply building a random piece of code into an exe file will get you about 10% chance of getting flagged by one of the "heuristic engines" if you upload it to VirusTotal.
You can contact the A/V vendor and they will usually add it to the whitelist, but it only lasts until the next rebuild. Or you can rebuild it a couple of times with different optimization levels, and the detection sometimes goes away.
[0] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/97856/can-simpl...
Us power users can always just configure the exception list.
[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/SecurityBu...
Let alone documents with macros...
Having said that, I wouldn't want to be one of those having to implement detection logics because the malware jungle is so creative that it's pretty much an impossible job they have to do.
I don’t think that antivirus is helpful in 2021. I think the most important thing you can do is make sure you are all patched and do not run as administrator.
Antivirus is likely to be unable to catch the really bad stuff, and it actually increases your attack surface. In addition, you pay a performance tax all the time. IMO, just not worth it.
Why do they have to use regular expressions?
"Setting a Windows Defender exception to the folder does not prevent the quarantine from occurring. I re-ran this test three times trying exceptions and even the entire NAS drive as on the excluded list."
Windows Defender is overriding the user whitelist?
It's really amazing the attitude Microsoft takes regarding hardware that isn't theirs, including the nonconsensual forced autoupdate.
In my opinion, Windows Defender is still the best antivirus software for consumers. That's not a compliment to Windows Defender, that's an insult to antivirus companies all over the world.
I fear the day when I try to play media I legally own from another region and can't play it because of region blocking and can't circumvent it because my "defense" software prevents me.
Another thing that scares me: services requiring said kinds of software. The mobile world is somewhat like this already and it is basically what bars users from using their mobile phones as full blown computers even though said phone are powerful enough for that.
There's nothing to stop you from booting into another OS and deleting the files implementing the harmful functionality. If there are checks for the presence of these files in other parts of the OS, you can remove them.
IMO it's a very dangerous attitude when people consider software immutable. You can achieve a lot by modifying software made by other people.
Encrypted disks with TPM-stored keys will certainly prevent unauthorised modification to a filesystem
> hardware allows booting arbitrary code
And this particular cat is already out of the bag with Win 11 REQUIRING TPM support with verified boot.
The war against general-purpose computing is in the final stages, and the garden-keepers have already won for almost everything that matters. Yes, you can still source open hardware and they will not fight against technical elites - a minority - but for the vast majority of users, it's over because they LIKE the closed apps holding data hostage.
After spending all that time working on it, I was hoping that I could just compile to the various OS/architectures and distribute that, but once someone tried using it I quickly found out that as soon as you downloaded my program, Windows Defender would flag it as malware and quarantine it. Even the builds in my project workspace that I compiled myself would get flagged/quarantined once it caught them.
I tried doing some research and it seems to just be a regular thing with Go apps because I think the runtime code would be common across malware written in Go, so basically all Go programs are automatically assumed to be malware by Windows unless you buy a cert and/or get enough people using it.
Or maybe this is more common than just Go programs. I've never really done anything like this before. But I ended up just abandoning attempting to release it properly and left the source code up on Github so if someone wants to compile it themselves they can. But the whole experience was a bit discouraging. It seems like there's really no cheap/easy way to distribute software. Webapps require hosting, and native code is assumed to be malware by default.
aggressively scan every .jar, but totally ignores .net executables
no wonder they do something similar with go executables, it's easy to recognize them after all
Then again, AVs detecting things as innocent as freshly-compiled "Hello World" programs is not new, and certainly makes one wonder just what exactly they are trying to detect.
Reminds me of the famous Earworm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
the only real cosmetic change i can see is for instance on the virus & threat protection page in windows 10, it says in red at the top of the window:
Your Virus & threat protection is managed by your organization.
It's tamper protection, you can disable it. (I hate it too.)
It slows down literally everything you do with your computer in the best case. In the worst case it breaks things and is itself an exploitation avenue. Mostly it just isn't actually very good at its job and malware defeats it regularly.
This is a bad tradeoff and other mitigation strategies make more sense in every scenario I can conceive of.
And yeah they do boot from a readonly C: with some magic to make it appear writable per session. But re-infection is quick, especially when you have extra writable data partitions.
Happily, the worm detected Avast and shut it down regularly and that's how I 4h later found out I had behaved like a regular user instead of a power one.
AV helps: 1) People do stupid things 2) defense in depth
The truth is that even really good technologists sometimes make mistakes. My insurance agent's email got hacked recently. I was in the process of renewing a policy, so opened the link to a phishing site and entered credentials. Oops. Thankfully I immediately noticed and changed the password (+ had two factor on.) Had that been an attached PDF instead I probably would have opened it.
At this point, consumer/end machine AV is a bit like vaccinations for diseases that are largely under control- attacks aren't spreading because the there are many protections in place, but if the unprotected population rises (especially in high value targets like developers) than the attacks will increase.
Configure AV? Sure. In fact just last week or so I had to validate that a server level product was really scanning user uploaded files correctly, so I had purposefully download known bad file (The sample file from EICAR) https://www.eicar.org/?page_id=3950). Getting defender setup so I could handle that file was annoying but manageable. I've also disabled real time scanning of certain applications and processes for performance reasons.
However, would I run without it on at all? Nope- I'm pretty good driver, but I still wear my seatbelt.
* See for instance documentation on Microsoft Defender ATP EDR in Block Mode
Defender ATP telemetry also sends much more home than the customer can ever see. They claim to anonymize it but anyone who works in security for a living knows just how much story you can tell with relatively little data.
I've been running Linux KDE dual booting for a year or so, and I've have touched Windows in (uptime...) - 22 days or so.
With Windows 11 coming bundled with Teams, and other "stuff" from Windows 10 including it becoming an 'internet first OS (x)' I'm getting stuff I don't want or need.
(x) although it's documented on the interwebs how to circumvent the dark pattern UI dialogs to turn stuff off.
Sounds like how I ended up on Linux full time. I dual booted for a while before I one day realized I hadn't booted into Windows for months. At that point I saw no valid reason to keep my Windows partition at all and just put in the effort to get my last few "Windowsy" activities switched over to Linux applications (mostly gaming and graphics related stuff).
On DeCSS, that made me nostalgic ahout DVDCSS and cracking a DVD movie in "just" 20 minutes with MPlayer. The key was cached, luckily.
Defender on personal systems owned & maintained by a knowledgeable power user, maybe less useful.
Still, Defender ATP in the corporate environment is so much, much more than just an anti-virus scanner. There its primary functionality is EDR first, anti-virus distant second. And it works phenomenally.
There is also a setting to permanently disable automatic sample reporting. I enabled that on all my Windows machines after the first time I caught Defender exfiltrating sensitive files like places.sqlite database out of my FF profile directory.
I spent a weekend on it last year and couldn't figure it out. Best I could surmise is that I need to wipe my hard drive and install a sketchy copy of "mad max edition" windows 10 enterprise, which I would have to download on TPB or some other Warez site.
https://github.com/AveYo/LeanAndMean
If you can run as TrustedInstaller, it becomes feasible to rip all of this kind of bullshit out.
Just got my latest patched Win10 Pro copy running totally free of defender. Service is properly stopped. I was able to stop it like you would any other with TI privileges. Local admin just gets denied.
https://itty.bitty.site/#Disable_Real_Time_Protection_Perman...
I'm not sure whether or not it works on non-pro versions of Windows.
https://www.pcgamer.com/permanently-disabling-windows-10s-bu...
How long is "temporary"?
> Not sure why you’d want to disable virus protection
Because Microsoft's implementation drags ass when fighting with one of Microsoft's other terrible messes - visual studio.
Also. It's my fucking computer.
It was absolutely necessary on my 2015-era laptop, especially in the era of WSL1 where every Linux-side file operation caused a Defender operation - made a huge difference running test suites, git operations and so on.
I've tried to leave it on my new laptop (esp on WSL2 where Defender doesn't get a look-in) but I can _smell_ when it's slowing me down.
Did a complete reinstall without installing any scene software and the problem was solved. Just because people haven't taken the time to properly investigate the security of cracks and keygens doesn't mean that they don't contain actual trojans.
OP Here. That lasted 3 days and then the file got blacklisted again as a generic definition.
Whitelists and exceptions in MS Defender still do not work. It ignores them and yeets the file anyway.
Glupteba!ml looks like a randomly generated thing, but I’m sure it’s not.
