Add Protected Folders to Controlled Folder Access in Windows 10  

It's a really unfortunate side effect of the whole concept of folder protection, I went through similar issues when I first activated my Bitdefender Anti Ransomware.
Because of the way that ransomware works and the fact that the scum that use it will by choice use a duplicate of a valid system file to host their code, any protection has to consider and protect against these aspects.

Microsoft has not, to my knowledge, made the side effects and requirements, known which causes confusion for users who often end up following the worst possible route and switching the protection off

Excellent point! Hope some of us can use this and provide MS the feedback for improvement.

As I understand, based on my understanding of Bitdefender and also from some minor titbits of Information from Microsoft, the Anti-Ransomware software when you mark an executable as safe will note the details and create it's own form of HashKey to prevent any other cloned executable from running and triggering the Ransomware. How it works I do not, and do not want, to know. If I could learn the algorytm used then so could the Ransomware Writers and circumvent the protection.

I have it turned on. It took about a week or so to identify and permit some half-dozen apps that I use (and it blocked from saving to my user folder). After that learning curve it hasn't got in my way.

Helpfully, the notification tells you exactly which app was blocked, so you know exactly what to add as an 'allowed app'.

If you no longer have the action center notification to hand, or if the path was truncated because it's too long, don't worry. These Controlled Folder Access events are also recorded in the Event Log as Event ID 1123 in...
Application and Service Logs/Microsoft/Windows/Windows Defender/Operational

Access Denied said:

I turned it on the other day when not ready to do this and within couple minutes I turned it off so fast

Yes, that was my first reaction too

But after a few weeks of adding apps the notifications stopped and it doesn't get in my way now.

If anyone that has this setting turned on and uses the program Lightshot to take screen shots, gets it working, please let me know. I have added the exe for Lightshot per the blocked logs in Event Viewer but it still will not let me save a screen shot to the desktop.

EDIT: I had to reboot after adding Lightshot to the allowed programs. I will now make sure every program I need is added and then perform one last reboot tonight.

Also added every one of my Macrium image location folders. I wasn't sure if adding just Y:\ (backups on Y drive) would cover the entire drive or not.

Access Denied said:

If anyone that has this setting turned on and uses the program Lightshot to take screen shots, gets it working, please let me know...

Intrigued, I've just downloaded and installed Lightshot on my test machine. Yes, adding it to allowed app doesn't work....


....until, that is, you restart the PC. It seems that because Lightshot.exe is already loaded in memory and running when you added it to 'allowed apps' the old controlled folder access settings still apply. A restart is necessary for the new settings to have an effect.