A current replace to Microsoft Defender has led some Home windows customers to lose shortcuts to their packages.
The weird concern resulted in Home windows icons and purposes shortcuts being faraway from the Taskbar and Begin Menu with none warning.
Each Home windows 10 and Home windows 11 customers seem to have been affected, with the antivirus program inflicting points for patrons internationally.
Microsoft Defender ASR concern
Although apparently just a few shortcuts have been affected, and never the precise apps, loads of customers are complaining in regards to the timeliness of the error: Friday 13.
Lots of whom have taken to on-line threads like Reddit (opens in new tab) and Microsoft’s Tech Group (opens in new tab) to complain.
One Reddit consumer explains that the Begin menu can also be affected: “I can’t open firefox by using the windows key and typing the name i have to go to program files”.
Microsoft issued a assertion (opens in new tab) that reads: “Windows Security and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers may have experienced a series of false positive detections for the Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule “Block Win32 API calls from Office macro” after updating to security intelligence builds between 1.381.2134.0 and 1.381.2163.0.”
The writer continues to clarify that the error is “primarily impacting Windows shortcut (.lnk) files”, and that customers who haven’t enabled the “Block Win32 API calls from Office macro” rule shouldn’t be affected.
One other consumer managed to restore the problem, however discovered that sure icons within the taskbar had change into invisible.
The corporate has issued a remedial repair to its antivirus, nevertheless many companies are nonetheless reporting that they haven’t been catered nicely for. Some complain that the repair “doesn’t restore Microsoft Office shortcuts which were deployed per-user”, whereas others have requested for steps to deploy the repair by way of Intune.
With new feedback being added every day, it’s clear that Microsoft must do extra to repair the continued Defender error. TechRadar Professional has requested Microsoft for clarification.