Suspicious Microsoft Defender Real-Time Protection Disabled

ATT&CK techniques

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects Microsoft Defender antimalware transitioning its protection state from enabled to disabled, an effect of the defendnot fake-AV registration documented by Huntress. Attackers disable real-time protection so that subsequent tooling executes without inspection. An unexpected protection state change to off is a strong defense-evasion signal on managed endpoints.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1685 — drag to rearrange

Windows Defender Tampering via Set-MpPreference and Exclusions

Suspicious Windows Defender Real-Time Protection Disabled via Policy Registry by Cephalus Ransomware

Suspicious Microsoft Defender Path Exclusion of User Directories (via process_creation)

Malicious Windows Defender Tampering via Set-MpPreference (via process_creation)

Malicious Container Runtime Tampering via chmod on runc (via process_creation)

In-Memory AMSI or ETW Bypass in PowerShell (via process_creation)

Malicious Microsoft Defender Critical Security Components Disabled - Command (via process_creation)

Malicious Microsoft Defender Service Deactivation Attempt - Command (via process_creation)

Malicious Wdigest Authentication Enabled - Reg via Command (via process_creation)

Suspicious Microsoft Defender Real-Time Protection Disabled

Pivot detection · T1685 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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