markets.books.microsoft

Bitdefender Box2 keeps blocking the same domain name.  This went on for a few weeks and the admins at Microsoft had more than enough time to update that cert by now. 

After reading this post I figured it went on long enough as it's now December and I'm getting the same messages. 

If you're like me and you don't use apps from the Microsoft store anyway... you could blackhole the website prior to it getting out to the BitDefender box and thus stop the alert from generating.  

You can do this a number of ways... modifying your host files, or using a pihole.  This blocks the PC lookup for the DNS naming markets.books.microsoft.com and that would make the message go away.  Basically what occurs is:

host makes DNS request to markets.books.microsoft.com -> Pihole/hostfile intercepts the request and drops it prior to sending out to Box2.

This is a useful technique that works in Cybersecurity to stop malicious requests from going out to the web.  

If you modify your hosts file on the local PC to block the request... that will have to be done on every PC.  Using a Pihole and making the pihole or another DNS server blackhole the DNS request is preferred if you have more than a couple machines to blacklist this DNS name on.

The other thing is you can do nothing and wait for whoever maintains markets.books.microsoft.com to actually update the cert.  

Now this DNS name is no way malicious... so you'd have to be careful because if you ever wanted to go to markets.books.microsoft.com then you'll have to remove this block.  I'm just sick of getting the message so I did something like this.  I may eventually unblock it and try it again maybe in a month or two to see if the website admin actually updated the cert... so you can just this as a temporary block until it is fixed.

With Bitdefender I have avoided many such suspicious pages. Believe me, if defender states its unsafe, take it seriously and take great care. great care. Tom (Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. James. I. 19).

Hello Tanya_T,

thank you for providing this question.

I am a seasoned Windows expert with almost a decade in usage and support experience and hope to resolve your problems quickly.

I will need some context to answer this.

Where did you encounter this name?

It could be a software library path since it has points inbetween.

If this solved your problem i am very happy if you would provide feedback and mark this as solved.

If this didn't solve your problem or you need further assistance please answer in this thread and i would be happy to help.

kind regards

F. Grobusch

I have BitDefender systems on my Windows 10 PC. Alerts keep coming up that a malicious problem could occur and in further investigating my alerts the address is: https://markets.books.microsoft.com/markets/markets.json

I don't believe that i have purchased anything from the Store but i have visited it a number of times to peruse what is available for my interests.

So to see that i have something malicious trying to access my computer isn't a positive experience. I'm not capable of following all kinds of paths etc. so this is what i'm curious about.

Thank you F. Grobusch for responding.

The only place I have ever encountered "...markets.books.microsoft…." is on my Bitdefender notification that it has blocked it as suspicious due to invalid certificate.  

I would like to know how that site is trying to connect to my computer as I have never visited Microsoft Store nor ever attempted to look for online books etc.  How can it pop up to be blocked by Bitdefender when I have never heard or seen that site, much less attempted to connect to it?

Hi there,

I have Bitdefender 2020 too and have experienced this notification in Bitdefender every time I use the EDGE browser in MSN.com .

I am not positively sure about this but I will venture out to say that sometime ago Microsoft announced it was no longer supporting Books (e-books I guess) in their app store and hence it is no longer updating that certificate. However, it seems that the Edge browser still tries to access this certificate thus the false positive. It's a nuissance.. I simply  ignore it but I will not whitelist it. I do not see any problems while browsing with EDGE. I do not get this notification in other browsers.