Windows Defender Registry Permissions

[Jody Thornton]

I have posted this question on the Windows 8 Forums as well.  So a bit of an involved situation here:

First off I wanted to add a registry key to make Windows Defender scan for incoming files only. I was going to add this DWORD value to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Real-Time Protection:

RealTimeScanDirection = 1

However I couldn't because the permissions likely didn't allow for it. So I changed the owner of the "Real-Time Protection" key from SYSTEM to Administrators (I even tried for my user account which is just the renamed Administrator account). I assigned full control rights to Administrators and "Me".

However I still cannot add the DWORD value.

Now I made myself owner of the entire Windows Defender key thread, and I can change values of other keys. But I can't add or change anything in the Real-Time Protection key.

I'm perplexed. After that, I want to see if there's a way to reset the permissions on the Windows Defender keys (the entire tree).. Any takers?

[Jody Thornton]

No worries.  I found a solution:

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/346835-cant-modify-registry-key-even-after-changing-permissions.html

[Jody Thornton]

Here's what I would like to find out though.

On Windows 8.1, what is the current Defender build? I have v4.8 on Windows 8 (original), but I wondered if Windows Defender was upgraded to v4.9 (similarly to MSE).  I found it surprisingly hard to find out this info on the interwebs ... lol

[jaclaz]

I would believe that the lack of info is "on purpose", the general idea of the continuous upgrade model is to remove information to the (tech savvy) user, everything is marked as "latest", and more or less leads, to "run windows update, it is the best choice for you".

The 4.8.207 version is August 2015:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3038936

and is the last one I could find (at least in this documented form), but there is no real way to make sure the above is "latest" one.

jaclaz
 

[Jody Thornton]

Yeppers that's precisely the version I have too

[NoelC]

I think real-time system protection strives to undo things you or any program do to Defender keys and values.  For obvious reasons.

-Noel

Edited April 19, 2016 by NoelC