Recently, Windows defender antivirus has become very hard to disable in Windows 10 (And probably 11), previously, you would disable tamper protection, then open gpedit.msc, navigate to the setting and voila, recently, doing this o longer works, now, as soon as you close group policy editor (gpedit.msc) and open it again, the setting to disable windows defender antivirus pops up again ! You were also abe to do this from the registry, which does not work now.
So, it turns out that you need the following extra steps now, So here are the complete instructions
1- Start as you would by disabling tamper protection, you can do that by going to “Windows security”, then Virus and threat protection, then click on the “Manage settings” button, and finally disable tamper protection
2- Create a file with the .REG extension containing the following and execute it !
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SecurityHealthService] "Start"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wscsvc] "Start"=dword:00000004
Now execute the above, if it does not work because “binary values can only be edited manually”, then you will need to visit the locations above in regedit (Run as administrator) and switch the values of both to (4) which means disabled
Now before proceeding to the following procedure (The same OLD procedure), You will need to restart your computer for the settings above to take effect
- Run gpedit.msc as administrator
- Computer configuration => Administrative templates => Windows Components => Microsoft defender antivirus
- Now, you should find the entry “Turn off Microsoft defender antivirus”, double click it, and select Enable then okay
- Restart your computer again
A message still appears urging me to enable it, Click the three dots at the top of that message and disable this notification so that you won’t accidentally re-enable antivirus by clicking the message