Windows Defender ignoring Exclusion

[Birphon]

So for whatever reason Windows Defender seems to really hate Steam. I have it installed on my SSD (NVME) but tried on my HDD and even borrowed a friends SSD (SATA) and it only seems to be my Desktop that WinDef really hates Steam. So I found out that you could add an "Exclusion" Microsoft's fancy name for a Blacklist. So I added the Folder (C:\Steam) onto the Exclusion list, and for safe measure, restarted my PC (checked to see if Exclusion was still there afterwards and it was)

 

Windows Defender continues to hate my Steam Installation. Anyway around this? 

[Aderalia]

I had similar issues with exiftool (a little tool to read and write metadata into media files) in the past. In my case it turned out that the .exe i excluded wasn't what was blocked but rather a temporary version of it that run from within the appdata folder.

Stuff like this makes it hard to exclude the right files, since they change all the time.

 

Also as far as i know excluding a folder just means that windows isn't looking for viruses in that folder. This does not mean that application are allowed to run from within it.

 

Your best bet would be to find out what exactly Windows Defender doesn't like about steam and exclude that specific detail (its usually the part that changes data, say a game updater service).

 

And just as a general rule: Make exclusions as tight es possible. Excluding just "steam.exe" means that EVERTHING with that name can do whatever it wants. And renaming a application is pretty easy to do.