Microsoft has released an update to fix that behavior, see Update KB4052623: Microsoft fixes Defender ScanSkip Bug. See also the marked answer.
Windows Defender, "Items Skipped During Scan"
I keep getting this notification after quick scans, "Windows Defender skipped an item due to exclusions or network protection settings."
To make this clear: I don't have ANY exclusions, and as far as I'm aware, I haven't changed my network protection settings in the past.
What's going on? Is this malware, or a bug with the new update? How do I fix this? I want to be reassured that I'm safe, this isn't very reassuring.
EDIT: Thank you to Techradar for bringing this issue to light. If any employees read this, could you perhaps re-title it in a way which doesn't make users feel so endangered by the bug? All of us have come to the conlusion that (especially with MBAM) we should be clear.
Windows for home | Windows 10 | Security and privacy
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Anonymous
2020-03-31T05:44:51+00:00 I keep getting this notification after quick scans, "Windows Defender skipped an item due to exclusions or network protection settings."
To make this clear: I don't have ANY exclusions, and as far as I'm aware, I haven't changed my network protection settings in the past.
What's going on? Is this malware, or a bug with the new update? How do I fix this? I want to be reassured that I'm safe, this isn't very reassuring.
EDIT: Thank you to Techradar for bringing this issue to light. If any employees read this, could you perhaps re-title it in a way which doesn't make users feel so endangered by the bug? All of us have come to the conlusion that (especially with MBAM) we should be clear.
Hi, Thanks to our team, Windows 8 Internal Antivirus Disabled What to do Restore to Windows Do not see the damage Please advise Thanks to our team
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Anonymous
2020-03-30T19:34:06+00:00 Indeed, since this update, the file scan problem on a network drive and displaying a notification after a quick or full scan seems to have been corrected.
Scan one or more files on a network drive seems to work again.
On the other hand, Windows Defender still does not seem to want to scan an entire folder on a network drive as before.
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Anonymous
2020-03-25T11:51:02+00:00 The update has fixed the problem. Thank you for the info.
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Anonymous
2020-03-25T00:46:49+00:00 After discussing this behavior within my blog Windows 10: Defender skips elements during scan, the reason for the message became clear. Defender avoids to scan network files (I postulate, that Microsoft has changed that recently).
You can ignore the warning - or you may use the workaround (which isn't recommended due to performance issues) discussed within my blog post Windows 10: Fix for skipped Defender scans. I've now proof, that the behavior has been changed in March 2020 within Defender's internal default settings (before March 2020 Defender scans network shares - now this is deactivated by default).
HTH
My questions is, I can understand ignoring network scans because of performance and traffic issues, but wouldn't that make viruses more vulnerable on the network? Now people are saying don't do Power Shell or manual fixing, because that could hurt performance. We should wait for an official explanation from Microsoft.
Jack