How to Turn On or Off Microsoft Defender Antivirus in Windows 10  

TairikuOkami said:

The only way to safely disable WD now, is to install a light 3rd party AV (Panda, Forticlient). You could disable WD services, but it is pretty much irreversible and it causes many issues and crashes within Windows.

That's a good alternative solution that I might consider using in the future. For now, I'm using "Turn off real-time protection" GP without any issues so far.

Brink said:

Hello Sequinoz, and welcome to Ten Forums.

Tamper Protection can only be permanently turned off via Settings instead for security reasons.

Turn On or Off Tamper Protection for Microsoft Defender Antivirus

Thanks Brink for the warm welcome and your input . Unfortunately, I already tried turning off Tamper Protection via Settings but still failed to fully disable Windows Defender. I'll stick with just turning off real-time protection via GP which seems to be working well enough for me.

Can confirm that DisableAntiSpyware no longer works – the key gets deleted after a restart. This can also be seen immediately by running gpupdate /force, by which the key is removed immediately. This also seems to be unrelated to the Tamper protection option, as running Get-MpComputerStatus in PS states that it’s off. Yet DisableAntiSpyware still gets removed.

Thanks, lad. Using LTSC 1809, so there’s no status in Security. However, MpComputerStatus in PowerShell, as stated, reports IsTamperProtected: False.

Indeed. Even though MpComputerStatus says that it’s off, i’m more inclined to believe that it’s not the case under the hood. I have also tried to forcefully disable Tamper protection by registry key (did so via safe mode because of the ownership problem), but even with the key and IsTamperProtected: False, DisableAntiSpyware still gets removed.

DisableAntiSpyware is no longer a way to turn off Windows Defender.

And since Windows Security in LTSC doesn’t have anything related to Tamper protection, what are our options?

Brink, please post in this thread when you get more information on the matter 👍