windows defender has suddenly become very aggressive/gung-ho

[pmv]

I've had Defender installed since first installing windows, and it's almost never found anything before, but recently it's started picking up files that have been on the system for a long time, and declaring them to be 'potentially unwanted apps' and asking to quarantine them (albeit, with 'low' threat ratings).

First it found an old bittorrent utility (that long ago I used for downloading some live recordings from Dime-a-Dozen). I haven't used it for ages anyway, and it's probably not inaccurate to say it's a "downloader" and "potentially unwanted", as I have no further use for it, so fine, I let it remove it.

Then it next complained about CCleaner - which I don't remember installing, but as far as I can work out is itself a utility for removing "unwanted apps" (I might have specifically installed it long ago, or maybe it came bundled with one of those Adobe updates or something, as they constantly try to get you to install sponsored apps like that)

Has Defender started getting more aggressive in what it considers to be malware, of late (including targetting rivals like CCleaner) or does this suggest something is infecting files on the system?

 

[mindless1]

Seems very unlikely that something is infecting those two particular files on the system, and not anything else. Everyone makes OS partition backups so just do a checksum comparison of the flagged files now, vs them on the backup.

I'd bet on Defender getting more aggressive. Heck, even Chrome browser now acts like malware, trying to force upon you the scanning of your drives, even when Chrome isn't running, even if you try to disable it 6 different ways!!

 

[Steltek]

You might also run a check on the Windows file system to ensure you don't have some corruption somewhere.

 

[pmv]

Well nothing more happened, and a full-scan, with different scanners, found nothing, so I guess it's just MS being persnickety about potential rivals!

Find myself feeling a bit paranoid about such things, given the sheer size of disks now - feels like there are many places for malware to hide, and full scans take _forever_.