Sudden Defender CFA "blocked" notification. Nothing blocked.

mjohnsonn2 · 24 Dec 2020

Why would I get a "Protected folder access blocked" notification from Defender when I open an xls under the conditions listed below?

The app is EXCEL.EXE, the folder is D:\Documents\Stuff.

1. I've accessed the same xls in that same folder many many times in the past and gotten no "blocked" notification so apparently it has not been necessary to add EXCEL.EXE to the CFA "allowed app" list in the past.

2. D:\Documents has always been on the CFA protected folders list.

3. Even though the message said access was blocked, the xls opened fine.

I have made no changes since this happened. I did not add Excel.exe to the allowed list, but I can now open the xls without any Defender notifications coming up.

Sure I can ignore the incident, but any ideas about what happened?

Windows 10 Pro 19042.685
Office 2019

Ghot · 24 Dec 2020

@mjohnsonn2

I don't use Office or Windows Defender, but it's probably Microsoft's way of suggesting you switch to Office 365.
Lately I've noticed Microsoft has been using Defender to "suggest" a lot of things to Windows users.

This is just my opinion ofc, but I've seen a lot of posts on here about Defender generating false positives about really benign programs.

mjohnsonn2 · 24 Dec 2020

suggesting you switch to Office 365.

really benign programs.

Interesting idea, but if that's what they are trying to suggest, they have failed with me. The only thought I'm getting is that there is a bug, perhaps in Defender, causing the notification. We're talking about Office 2019 too which is more than really benign.