![]() Only the components of the antivirus that absolutely need the full privileges will not be sandboxed, while most of the other components will run in a sandbox. ![]() The sandbox feature restricts part of Windows Defender’s privileges to minimize the potential damage that an attacker taking over Windows Defender could create. A similar flaw was already found in Windows Defender last year, which may have prompted Microsoft to develop the sandbox feature in the first place. However, this also means that if an attacker could exploit Windows Defender, they could also take over the users’ systems. Like most security solutions, to be effective, Windows Defender also needed high privileges to access and scan all sorts of files on a Windows machine without user assistance. Yet another issue created by Windows Defender being the default antivirus solution on hundreds of millions of PCs was that more sophisticated attackers would also be encouraged to find ways to turn Defender against its own users. ![]() ![]() However, it could still take many months or years before the attack and specific Defender bypass would be discovered. Microsoft would eventually learn about those new attacks and protect against them, as other antivirus companies typically do when they learn about new attacks about which their antivirus wasn't previously aware. To make their malware run on Windows machines, attackers would have to first learn how to bypass the Defender protections, otherwise their malware would always be blocked as soon as it landed on users' PCs. Making Windows Defender the default antivirus also meant that it became the malicious actors’ primary antivirus target. One of the issues was that other antivirus companies didn’t like that Microsoft was making them obsolete, because before long, most users may learn that they don't need another antivirus to protect their PCs. This meant users wouldn’t need third-party antiviruses anymore (in theory), which inevitably brought its own set of issues. When Microsoft launched Windows 8, the company also shipped it with the Windows Defender antivirus (previously called Microsoft Security Essentials) by default. Consequences of a Default Antivirus Solution If that child process doesn’t show, then make sure that the MP_FORCE_USE_SANDBOX variable is created and set to 1 and then restart your PC.
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