Tag Archive: Exclusions

Tamper Protection for Exclusions in Defender

One thing that threat actors commonly do when getting a foothold on a device, is to try to disable Defender services and adding exclusions for their tools which they plan to execute.

For the Defender services, we have had Tamper Protection for some time, but that did not cover exclusions.

Tamper Protection configuration via Intune

Requirements

For Tamper Protection to cover exclusions, the following requirements must be met:

Disable Local Admin Merge

Verifying and troubleshooting

The registry value TPExclusions which is in the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Features key shows a value of 1 if protected and 0 if not protected. Please note that you cannot change the registry value to protect the exclusions, it’s for information and not configuration

While we talk about Antivirus policies…

We would like to share this as well since it’s something we see when we do Defender assessments, it’s unfortunately very common that these settings are wrong

Cloud block level (high is recommended minimum) and Cloud Extended Timeout check must be set to 50 (seconds)
Sample submission is required for Cloud protection

And for

Happy Hunting!