Microsoft Defender recognizes text generated with Notepad as a virus

A rather confusing identification of the default antivirus software that comes with Windows : Notepad as a virus.

Microsoft Defender, the built-in antivirus software of Windows, is considered powerful enough that ordinary users do not need to use additional partsantivirus or third-party security suites. However, a bug that has just been shared by yappy users on Twitter/X shows that sometimes Microsoft Defender is “super enthusiastic” in protecting old computers a friend.

A false positive occurs when you type the text “This content is no longer available.” (or “This content is no longer available!”) into Notepad and save as a text file on your PC. At this point, Microsoft Defender will immediately mark it as a Trojan file and delete it from the system – no matter what you name the file, with the ostensible reason of protecting you from potential “serious hazards.

Through initial investigation, yappy and several other Twitter/X users concluded that the cause of the misidentification error was a SHA-256 conflict. However, most current opinion is that the likelihood of such a conflict is extremely low. Instead, the highlighted text string may have appeared in some previous threat, thus triggering the alert in Microsoft Defender’s detection engine.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has had problems with Defender antivirus. Previously, Microsoft had caused Defender to stop working in 2020 due to a bug update, and patched a critical vulnerability in 2019 that caused the application to dry can function normally. However, ignoring these flaws, Microsoft Defender is still considered a pretty good antivirus.

Fortunately, the bug this time around isn’t as serious as the previous ones, as the text doesn’t pose any real threat to the Windows 11. Furthermore, if you add other characters to the text (such as changing punctuation or adding a space at the end), Defender will no longer be misidentified. However, in the rare case that you need to accurately save this text string to a text file on your computer, you need to exclude the file folder from the scans; otherwise, the file will disappear as soon as you press Ctrl+S.

Hopefully Microsoft can fix this silly bug soon. It doesn’t affect the security of Windows 11 and no one wants to have to do it temporarily disable Microsoft Defender to install other antivirus software while waiting for the patch. Besides, Kaspersky, a popular alternative, has recently become less attractive due to Washington’s sanctions.