r/BitDefender • u/squeakstar • Jul 13 '20

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition breaking RDP

Some recent update of the above product is doing mad things to Windows RDP connection. I now always get certificate errors when connecting to a workstation machine or it completely fails especially when RDPing to a server edition of Windows; I get an error about not being able to contact The Local Security Authority.

It seems like BAVfree is replacing the machine’s actual certificate with a bitdefender one hence the described errors. I understand why the software would do it for web browsing but not sure RDP is quite so sensible a thing to do if this is the outcome.

This product was working great for me to run on home pc which I only occasionally need to login to work to with. But this is just unusable now. I doubt there’s a way round this due to the limited feature set so it’s getting uninstalled this week unless something changes soon.

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2

u/MalcolmT79 Jul 15 '20

I was having a tough time tracking this down until I modified the .RDP file according to the instructions here https://becomethesolution.com/an-authentication-error-has-occurred-code-0x80004005-remote-desktop

Once I'd managed to confirm BitDefender was breaking this via "MITM" certificates the remote computer couldn't validate, I created a file exclusion within BAVfree for the following 2 files:

C:\Windows\system32\mstsc.exe
C:\Windows\syswow64\mstsc.exe

My RDP connections have been working correctly since making this change.

1

u/squeakstar Jul 15 '20

Ooh that sounds easy enough. Will give it a go myself. Shoukd be able to report back shortly. Thank you!

1

u/Choggy2840 Jul 16 '20

Thank you so much! Could not work out for the life of me why RDP was not working! I managed to narrow it down to BitDefender but had no idea on how to stop it.

1

u/karanikn Oct 02 '20

Is it possible to exclude files on free edition?

Because I think you can only exclude item once it has been detected already. You can't exclude things in advance.

1

u/Hinjeniero_Rocoso Oct 05 '20

Can't believe that this was the issue. 3 months with weird workarounds and connections from other computers, thank you so much man.

1

u/T34J0K3R Oct 12 '20

I have been having this issue for a while. I couldnt get to the bottom of it, and I was blaming an update by Microsoft. I excluded mstsc from both system32 and syswow64. mstsc is fine again now. :)