Bitdefender Disables Anti-Exploit Monitoring in Chrome After Google Policy Change

Last week Chrome has started displaying alerts more often that suggest users remove programs that are considered incompatible applications with Chrome because they inject code into the browser’s processes. These alerts are displayed by Chrome after the browser crashes and suggest the user remove the listed programs because “this application could prevent Chrome from working properly.”

One of the programs that a lot of users have seen listed in these alerts and is suggested to be removed is the Bitdefender antivirus program as shown above. Having a well known company like Google telling users to remove a security solution is a problem as these programs are important for many users to have installed on their computers in order to protect them from malware, unwanted programs, and malicious websites.

Due to these alerts and their suggestion to remove the antivirus software, Bogdan Botezatu, a senior e-threat analyst for Bitdefender, has told Bleeping Computer that as of August 20th, Bitdefender is no longer monitoring Chrome 66 and later with their anti-exploit technology.

Starting with the Chrome browser version 66, Google has gradually rolled out a new feature that prevents third party software from monitoring the application’s processes. While this measure ensures that rogue applications do not interfere with the Google product, it also prevents security solutions from inspecting the browser’s memory in search of potentially dangerous exploit code.

With version 66, Google Chrome displays a post-crash warning asking users to remove the security solution if it monitors the browser’s processes, even if the security solution is not responsible for the respective crash. In order to prevent this message from occurring and having users unwarily uninstall the security solution – which would leave them exposed to a vast array of online threats, Bitdefender has issued an update to stop the Anti-Exploit technology from monitoring the Chrome browser. The update was delivered to customers on August 20th at 7:00 AM ET.

As a leading global cybersecurity technology company, Bitdefender is committed to providing cutting edge end-to-end cyber security solutions and advanced threat protection to more than 500 million users in more than 150 countries. We regret being forced into removing protection for one of the world’s most popular browser and we urge users to not uninstall their security solution they have installed on their computers.

This is obviously concerning as users who use both Bitdefender and current versions of Chrome will no longer be fully protected when browsing the web.