Not surprised. Just the other day I found Defender using a significant portion of my CPU, which was curious because I have Defender disabled. Did a virus and malware scan thinking it was some other program calling itself Defender, nothing. Double checked windows antivirus settings, claims it is disabled. So off to google which leads me to more ways to hard disable Defender, and it worked confirming Defender was used as a screen by Microsoft for a more nefarious process. There is nothing legitimate defender could have been doing to be using so much CPU and memory when the antivirus capabilities were disabled.
>So off to google which leads me to more ways to hard disable Defender, and it worked confirming Defender was used as a screen by Microsoft for a more nefarious process
Why immediately jump to "screen by Microsoft for a more nefarious process"? It sounds like you were sloppy with your initial disabling (or more charitably, microsoft dark patterns), so you actually disabled "real time protection" or whatever, rather than everything.
30 years ago they couldn't upload it because you didn't have an internet connection, but if everyone did it would have, because they didn't know the origin of an exe file 30 years ago either.
So basically, paranoia confirmed.
Why immediately jump to "screen by Microsoft for a more nefarious process"? It sounds like you were sloppy with your initial disabling (or more charitably, microsoft dark patterns), so you actually disabled "real time protection" or whatever, rather than everything.
How is Defender supposed to know the origin of an exe on disk?
Like any antivirus program did 30 years ago. I know, SW is hard at Microsoft but ...
No, in 1996 it's extremely likely that they did have an Internet connection, though probably a crummy dialup one.
(Or ameliorated )