Windows Defender, "Items Skipped During Scan"

Anonymous
2020-03-10T15:47:27+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.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Security and privacy

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Günter Born 49,461 Reputation points
2020-03-25T08:23:30+00:00

Microsoft has released an update to fix that behavior, see Update KB4052623: Microsoft fixes Defender ScanSkip Bug. See also the marked answer.

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-03-20T19:57:58+00:00

    I’ve been having it since I turned on my pc today, its probably just a bug. I reported the bug to microsoft as well.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-03-20T19:44:45+00:00

    I use Windows 10 Home 1909 and I have the same problem with Windows Defender since the beginning of March.

    I have this notification that appears after a manual scan or when I want to scan files on a network drive.

    I'm talking about it here :

    https://answers.microsoft.com/fr-fr/protect/forum/all/el%c3%a9ments-ignor%c3%a9s-pendant-lanalyse/1fd44d4d-5df8-46a8-bd92-45bda9a7303e

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-03-20T18:57:59+00:00

    This happened to me this morning. I dont know of any viruses or malware on my pc, I also havent downloaded anything in the past month, so i think this is a bug that still hasnt been fixed.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-03-20T16:50:37+00:00

    That "items skipped" message doesn't bother me. All else looks good running the manual scan.

    But I haven't seen a notification that Defender has run automatically in quite a while. That worries me. All the settings for it look good, & Defender still says "no action needed", though...

    Defender definitely doesn't always run automatically, the schedule ranges from unpredictable to insane.

    Manual scanning is no issue for me.

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