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

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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
    2020-03-20T21:13:02+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.

    Thanks for the comforting words. I can't say I've seen the automatic one run every day, that's right. But I don't think I've seen it since March 15, the date I first posted into this this thread. I'll wait a day or two more before panicking. Thanks again.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-03-21T02:47:16+00:00

    Having same problem on 2 of 3 computers. The one not having this problem hasn't gotten the March Culmlitave update yet

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-03-21T03:16:10+00:00

    Ok, its most likely a bug with the march update then.

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