Antimalware Service executable using a high amount of memory even after disabling windows defender through group policy.

I am using windows 8.1, I ran into this issue a little while ago and restarting my computer would fix the high memory usage, but it continued occuring and I started looking for a more permament fix.

After some research it seemed that if you had another AV software, Windows Defender would disable itself. I already had Malwarebytes installed, but I reinstalled just in case something was messed up. This didn't work, so I ran full scans with both defender and malwarebytes to rule out actual malware, but my computer turned up clean.

I then started looking for ways to disable defender. A lot of online guides showed a way to disable defender through the program itself under the administrator tab, but I had no such option. I tried putting MSMOENG in the executable exclusion zone, I tried disabling through the task scheduler with no effect, I tried disabling though regedit but was unable to edit any values.

I thought I was unable to disable it through group policies since I could not open or find the group policies editor, but I was able to download this file and run it to disable the program though group policy. This is the tutorial that contained the .reg file. This worked initially but after a few hours antimalware service executable was back to hogging memory. I checked to see if defender had not been successfully disabled, but I was still disabled through group policy. I restarted to see if that would fix it again.

Its currently sitting at 312.5mb and 0% everything else. Is there any other ways to stop this program from running? Or are there any other, more drastic fixes I can consider?

Submitted April 29, 2018 at 02:58AM by sil8r https://ift.tt/2jdYRVC