Microsoft Edge is making Suspicious Connection?

Quoting a Reddit post from 9 years ago as a source of truth about a product is not a good idea. And it should be obvious why it's not.

As advising people to trust a website because it is under Microsoft control or anyone else control when their certificates are expired is dangerous.

Certificates are a key part of the security implementation and one of their functions is to Certify the website you try to reach is legit.

Discarding this warning is like sending money to someone without checking his identity. 'Look he has 2 legs, 2 arms and a head, pretty sure it's him!'

Just, no.

People at Microsoft had probably warnings WEEKS before the expiration of those certificates and they did nothing.

Problem is not with Defender, stop shooting the messenger.

Read the entire thread Steven & Phober, there's a lot more known about this Microsoft MSN support website than you realize, so it really doesn't matter from a security sense that the certificate isn't up to date, since all of the sites involved are within Microsoft's control.

That's not saying it's a false positive, but in truth, Bitdefender displaying this alert in this case is simply annoying the user and doing nothing to truly 'protect' you.

In fact, from what I've seen, the simplest way to remove the problem is to simply turn off the MSN Newsfeed on the default New Tab settings in Microsoft Edge, since that's apparently where the article pages are that are calling these particular error reporting pages with the expired certificate. In other words, if the MSN News pages don't display, the errors also shouldn't occur, though I don't have Bitdefender to test and would never want it installed on my own devices.

I've personally disabled the MSN Newsfeed and other default Microsoft start pages over 2 decades ago, since I prefer a simple About: Blank web page with no content as my own initial display, so I'd never see this issue in any case. I don't believe in vendor provided pages and instead prefer to choose my own, which provides true security and privacy.

Rob

Rob Koch, evidently you are far more knowledgeable than I about Windows, MSEdge and MSN. I couldn't and didn't presume that the suspect ????.nelreports.net sites would automatically be Microsoft sites.

I followed the Microsoft help link but only received one screen. I don't recall any obvious indication that there were historical discussions that I could review, and I doubt whether I would have understood any jargon if I had found them.

I'm also disheartened by your condemnation of Bitdefender without explanations or suggested alternatives. That strikes me as unprofessional.

Stephen Cooper

It is not false positive! The site does not have a valid certificate, so it could be redirected to a hacker site.

Most probably it is not redirected anywhere, only the certificate is invalid as expired, but anyhow it should not be reported as false positive, the cert must be fixed.

NO! If "deff.nelreports.net" and/or "bzib.nelreports.net" is/are malicious, "fixing" the certificate is completely WRONG. It should be inspected and deleted if necessary. That's a job for Microsoft.

I have to trust Bitdefender's certificate check and refusal on the ground of invalidity.

I have never seen either "deff.nelreports.net" or "bzib.nelreports.net" on this or any of my other computers so I presume it is malicious. I cannot determine whether Bitdefender's warning messages arise from access attempts by that website to the Edge software on this computer or a call from Edge to that website. I presume the former but do not know how to prevent its future success and damage if it obtains a valid certificate.

These are the reports I get using EdgeDev