MB v4.5.27 - Security Advisor Alerts for Tamper Protection Have Returned

[lmacri]

I received a pop-up in my system tray today with a generic warning to check Security Advisor for an unresolved issue.

 

I clicked the Check Security Advisor button and was surprised to see that my warning to enable Tamper Protection (Settings | General | Tamper Protection | Limit Who Can Change Your Malwarebytes Settings) is back.  It was surprising to see see this since I had dismissed this warning in MB v4.5.5 (see the third image in my old 03-Mar-2021 post in Security Advisor Warning Returns After Being Dismissed in MB v4.4.10) and it is my understanding is that Security Advisor monitoring of the Tamper Protection setting was completely removed from MB v4.5.7 in March 2022.  See my 31-Mar-2022 post in my thread MB v4.5.4 Security Advisor Warning for Tamper Protection Confusing, as well as @Porthos's subsequent reply confirming that Security Advisor in their MB v4.5.7 was no longer monitoring the status of their Tamper Protection setting. 

 

I noticed that the change log <here> for MB v4.5.27 says this version fixed an issue where "Security Advisor alerting when Chrome is up to date".  Did Malwarebytes re-introduce monitoring of the Tamper Protection setting in v4.5.27, and if so why does my main dashboard have a green status (Your device is protected") when I have not clicked the small "x" highlighted in blue in my second image above to dismiss my Tamper Protection warning yet.  If I'm getting system tray pop-ups advising me to turn on Tamper Protection (which I don't want to do) then I would have expected my dashboard to have an orange status ("Careful, you're not fully protected") until that warning was dismissed.

mbst-grab-results.zip
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v22H2 build 19045.2846 * Firefox v112.0.2 * Microsoft Defender v4.18.2303.8-1.1.20200.4 * Malwarebytes Premium v4.5.27.262-1.0.1991 * Macrium Reflect Free v8.0.7279 * Dell Inspiron 5583/5584 BIOS v1.22.1
Dell Inspiron 15 5584, Intel i5-8265U CPU, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB Toshiba KBG40ZNS256G NVMe SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 620

Edited April 25, 2023 by lmacri

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[H4V0C]

Hi @lmacri thank you for your feedback. Let me try to break this up in an attempt to clarify.

• Issue 1: You previously dismissed the warning regarding Tamper Protection, however Security Advisor has started alerting you on this again. This is unexpected behavior. Once you've dismissed/ignored an item, Security Advisor should continue ignoring it unless you were to:
  • enable Tamper Protection and then disable it
  • or, if you were to perform a clean install
  • If none of the above are true, please let us know and so we can file a bug for this
• Issue 2: Security Advisor monitoring of the Tamper Protection setting was completely removed from MB v4.5.7. We had some issues with Security Advisor incorrectly alerting that Chrome was out of date. Due to the high number of users impacted by this, we temporarily disabled the Security Advisor notifications until we improved how we monitor Chrome for updates. As far as I know, Security Advisor never stopped monitoring Tamper Protection, we just disabled the tray notifications due to the Chrome issue.
• Issue 3: Security Advisor status is green, not orange, when Tamper Protection is off. This is because the Security Advisor status only goes to orange when one or more critical issues are detected. Tamper Protection is considered a "warning" tier item, not a "critical" tier issue.

Hope this helps, thanks again for reaching out.

Edited April 26, 2023 by H4V0C
Fixed typos

[lmacri]

16 hours ago, H4V0C said:

• Issue 1: You previously dismissed the warning regarding Tamper Protection, however Security Advisor has started alerting you on this again. This is unexpected behavior. Once you've dismissed/ignored an item, Security Advisor should continue ignoring it unless you were to:
  • enable Tamper Protection and then disable it
  • or, if you were to perform a clean install
  • If none of the above are true, please let us know and so we can file a bug for this

Hi H4V0C:

Thanks for your prompt response.

According to my notes and as best as I can recall, I've never enabled Tamper Protection (Settings | General | Tamper Protection | Limit Who Can Change Your Malwarebytes Settings) or clean reinstalled MB 4.x since MB v4.2.1.89-1.0.1061 was originally installed on my Win 10 laptop on 14-Oct-2020.
 

Quote

Issue 2: Security Advisor monitoring of the Tamper Protection setting was completely removed from MB v4.5.7. We had some issues with Security Advisor incorrectly alerting that Chrome was out of date....As far as I know, Security Advisor never stopped monitoring Tamper Protection...

Are you certain that Security Advisor never stopped monitoring Tamper Protection?  When I checked my Security Advisor details in MB Premium v4.5.7.186-1.0.1645 on 31-Mar-2022  I could not find any mention of the status of my Tamper Protection monitoring under General Settings, in my dismissed (hidden) items, or in any other section of Security Advisor - see my 31-Mar-2022 post in the product suggestion MB v4.5.4 Security Advisor Warning for Tamper Protection Confusing.  Porthos replied <here> that same day confirming that "It is not any more on mine", which is why I assumed Malwarebytes had decided to stop monitoring the status of the Tamper Protection setting.

When these Security Advisor pop-ups about Tamper Protection first started appearing back in early 2022 many users enabled Tamper Protection without understanding the consequences and later discovered that they couldn't manage their configuration settings or uninstall Malwarebytes because they had forgotten their Tamper Protection password.  Is it possible that the software devs temporarily removed Tamper Protection monitoring in Security Advisor until they could improve documentation for this feature?  

If the software devs added Tamper Protection monitoring back into Security Advisor after MB v4.5.7 was released that might have "unhidden" my Security Advisor warning that Tamper Protection was turned off and I just didn't notice it.  If that's correct then I'm guessing something changed recently because yesterday was the first time I've seen a system tray notification nagging me to turn on Tamper Protection in over a year.
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v22H2 build 19045.2846 * Firefox v112.0.2 * Microsoft Defender v4.18.2303.8-1.1.20200.4 * Malwarebytes Premium v4.5.27.262-1.0.1991 * Macrium Reflect Free v8.0.7279 * Dell Inspiron 5583/5584 BIOS v1.22.1
Dell Inspiron 15 5584, Intel i5-8265U CPU, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB Toshiba KBG40ZNS256G NVMe SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 620

Edited April 26, 2023 by lmacri