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Windows Defender alerts to send firefox.exe to microsoft after upgrading to 16.0.2

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  • Last reply by philipp

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Windows Defender posted an message in Windows Action Center with a title "Review the files that Windows Defender will send to Microsoft (Important)"

This showed a popup message that informed that Windows Defender needed to make a Sample Submission of the following files: "Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" "Mozilla Firefox\plugin-container.exe".

This happen both in my Desktop PC (Win 7 x64 SP1 Ultimate) and in my Laptop (Win 7 x64 SP1 Home), the difference being that in the Laptop's case one additional file was required to be reported i.e. "Mozilla Maintenace Service\maintenanceservice_tmp.exe"

Windows Defender posted an message in Windows Action Center with a title "Review the files that Windows Defender will send to Microsoft (Important)" This showed a popup message that informed that Windows Defender needed to make a Sample Submission of the following files: "Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" "Mozilla Firefox\plugin-container.exe". This happen both in my Desktop PC (Win 7 x64 SP1 Ultimate) and in my Laptop (Win 7 x64 SP1 Home), the difference being that in the Laptop's case one additional file was required to be reported i.e. "Mozilla Maintenace Service\maintenanceservice_tmp.exe"

Chosen solution

hello shadownate, i think this is a normal process when you are a member of MAPS (Microsoft Active Protection Service) and chose to submit information about unknown applications. in case microsoft defender comes across an application version that doesn't show up in ms' database yet (which might well be the case for firefox executables immediately after an update), they upload the file and analyse it - this is the way they gather new information to create signatures for unknown threats. Plugin-container.exe & maintenanceservice.exe are part of firefox and won't pose a risk to your system.

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Chosen Solution

hello shadownate, i think this is a normal process when you are a member of MAPS (Microsoft Active Protection Service) and chose to submit information about unknown applications. in case microsoft defender comes across an application version that doesn't show up in ms' database yet (which might well be the case for firefox executables immediately after an update), they upload the file and analyse it - this is the way they gather new information to create signatures for unknown threats. Plugin-container.exe & maintenanceservice.exe are part of firefox and won't pose a risk to your system.