Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications to provide integrated protection against sophisticated attacks. The colleagues from Bleeping Computer pulled the information together and have covered it in more details within this article.Want to experience Microsoft 365 Defender? Learn more about how you can evaluate and pilot Microsoft 365 Defender. It is currently unclear to me whether the changes are implemented via Windows Update or via updates to the Defender scan engine under Windows. However, security researcher Will Dormann writes that this has not been fixed on all machines in his case. Security researcher Antonio Cocomazzi confirms this fix in his tweet.

It looks like the Februsecurity updates have fixed this vulnerability.

Administrator permissions are suddenly required to access registry entries. The following tweet from a security researcher addresses the issue. Microsoft adjusts permissionsĪs part of undisclosed updates, Microsoft appears to have quietly fixed the Defender vulnerability in Windows outlined above by adjusting permissions. The vulnerability is said to have existed for eight years, according to this tweet. The colleagues at Bleeping Computer had picked this up in this article in mid-January 2022 and published more details. Windows 10 (in the current versions 21H1 and 21H2) was affected, but not Windows 11. This allowed querying the paths that Microsoft Defender is not allowed to scan for malware or dangerous files (due to administrator defaults).

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