Microsoft Defender once again flags Chrome updates as suspicious

Microsoft Defender antivirus and malware protection protocols have been flagging critical updates for Google Chrome as suspicious. The issue, so far, seems to be localized to Windows Defender for Endpoint. 

As suggested in the summary, this is by far the first time that Microsoft Defender has flagged verified safe software and updates as suspicious. In February 2021, we saw a very similar issue where updates to Google Chrome were being flagged as suspicious by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Even more alarming, the enterprise version of Microsoft’s native antivirus has even gone so far as to flag essential updates to Microsoft Office as suspicious and potentially harmful, as we saw, and reported on, fairly recently. 

It is pertinent to mention again though that the largest number of issues of this kind are localized to the enterprise version of the software, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. As the situation currently stands, Microsoft Defender for Windows Home users has not presented any such issues. Microsoft Defender for Home has, on the contrary, performed exceedingly well as an antivirus utility, specifically in the recent AV-Comparatives and AV-TEST antivirus rankings. 

Microsoft issued a statement, through its MVP Ota Hirufumi on Twitter a short while ago, confirming that the issue experienced with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint was merely a case of a false positive: 

‘SERVICE ADVISORY:

[DZ361393] Admins may receive a false positive alert for Google Update on Microsoft Defender for Endpoint monitored devices

Service: Microsoft 365 Defender

Status: ServiceRestored

LastUpdated: 2022-04-20T00:30:32.717Z’

In response to the incident, Microsoft also published a guide for false positives and negatives in hopes of reducing the occurrences of such errors, however the move doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect yet.

This is not the only issue Microsoft have been having lately with their Defender utility; recently they’ve had to address driver security within Windows Defender as well. But luckily, the program has been on the receiving end of features that will make Windows Defender even stronger going forward.