Windows Defender Falsely Identifies Alexa Toolbar as a "Trojan Downloader"

I talked about the Advantages of Using the Alexa Toolbar in my last post. I mentioned that many anti-spyware programs will identify the Alexa Toolbar as spyware.

Shortly after making that post, I discovered that Windows Defender is now classifying the Alexa Toolbar as a "Trojan Downloader" or "Trojan Clicker." Normally, you would definitely want Windows Defender to identify such malicious software and get rid of it. But you don't want to do that to the Alexa Toolbar.

What is particularly disturbing about Windows Defender's recent classification of the Alexa Toolbar is that you probably would not know that Windows Defender is referring to the Alexa Toolbar. Here is what you see on your Windows Defender screen:

Here's a close-up of the warning so you can see how ominous it looks:

When I saw that the first time, I clicked the "Remove All" button right away! But then I noticed my Alexa Toolbar wasn't working and I eventually put two and two together.

It wasn't easy though because when you click on "Review items detected by scanning" you see:

It might be hard to see, but Windows Defender identifies the Alexa Toolbar as "Win32/VB.BZ" which might be the correct way to label it in computer-speak but I sure the heck didn't know what it was at first. I only identified it as the Alexa Toolbar by scrolling further down that page, where amidst a bunch of codes I don't understand I saw reference to the Toolbar.

To prevent Windows Defender from repeatedly misidentifying the Alexa Toolbar as a trojan, click on the drop-down menu and change it from "Remove" to "Always allow" and then click the "Apply Actions" button on the lower right of your screen.

I found one other blog post about this problem, by Tom Keating, who judging from his bio, has substantial technical expertise. Click here to see his post about Windows Defender labeling the Alexa Toolbar as a "trojan." He offers some more details and some speculation about why Windows Defender might be making this misidentification.