Suspicious Error Message?

[Guest]

On checking for Defender updates today, a Microsoft Error Reporting Message
popped up titled "Mallware Signeture Download" - note the mis-spellings. It
detailed an error that was supposed to have occurred on my pc and asking me
to submit the report to Microsoft.

I wondered whether this was an authentic message, despite the mis-spelling.
Has anyone else seen such a message?

 

[Bill Sanderson MVP]

It is possible for such a message to be real, but I haven't seen one with
those mis-spellings. If you see it again, it would be interesting to
collect two bits of information/data

1) a screenshot of the error message--hit PrintScreen, and paste into Word,
or Wordpad.

2) go to a command prompt, in the Windows Defender installation folder and
type:

mpcmdrun -GetSWE

This will collect the list of running software on your system that the
Software enumerators in Windows Defender can see.

Start, run, type in cmd and hit enter.

cd \program files\windows defender

mpcmdrun -GetSWE

(wait a few minutes--this takes some time to run)
(type exit, to close the command prompt window)

I'd be interested in seeing the screen shot. You could zip it up and send
it to:

bill_sanderson @ msn.com
(without the spaces)

The output of the GetSWE may be large--and I have to remember where it is
kept--don't worry about that for the time being.

 

[Guest]

Was there any more to this? I have just seen the same strange error message
for the first time. Interestingly (?) the message appeared showing a date and
time when I had no Internet or other connection open and so attemts to
download anything, however badly spelled were doomed to failure. I first saw
the message the following day when there was an Internet connection vailable.

I am running the release version of Defender, I upgraded from the Beta 2 a
couple of weeks ago.