There seems to be a significant error in Windows Defender, the free antivirus software that comes with the Windows 10.
If you try to run a quick scan or a full scan after some seconds the application will stop, and scan few files. So the results it will display are not reliable. Such scans are known to take quite some time to complete.
The subject has been mentioned very recently in Forums Microsoft Technical Support [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], but also on Reddit [1, 2, 3, 4].
The bug seems to exist from the version of Windows Defender 4.18.1908.7, which was released earlier this week. The bug was introduced when Microsoft tried to fix another bug that was introduced in July 2019.
According to reports, the initial error "corrupted" the "sfc / scannow" command, which allows Windows users to scan the system for corrupted files.
After July's Patch Tuesday, this utility started marking some of the internal features of Window Defender as corrupted, causing misleading messages to mislead users. So many believed that there was a problem with the installation of Windows Defender and its updates.
Microsoft released a bug fix for this bug last week, but apparently did not have the expected results.
This issue does not appear to affect Windows Defender only on Windows 10, but all other versions of Windows that run Windows Defender. The same error has been reported for Security Essentials, the precursor of Windows Defender in earlier versions of Windows.
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