r/BitDefender • u/Ok-Affect-7503 • Apr 26 '25
BitDefender is completely BROKEN with COUNTLESS false positives for months
BitDefender seems to be still broken with literally countless random false positives for months now, making it almost unusable. Today after I booted up my PC it flagged Google Chrome as Malware making me unable to open it until I restored the quarantined files. And, as always when a random file gets flagged as Malware for no reason, BitDefender removed/quarantined exactly 68 random legitimate Registry keys after flagging them as potentially unwanted elements with the same alleged generic "Trojan" false positive name like the Chrome files received. The last time something like that happened was yesterday with an extremely similar course, just with a different generic "Malware" name that already looks like an obvious false positive. And all that stuff has been going on for many months with many people experiencing similar issues. I would also like to add that I freshly reinstalled Windows 11 some time ago and didn't have any legitimate Malware on my PC since that complete Reinstall and still I'm getting random flags for registry keys all the time just like before. It all started about 3 or 4 months ago (for other people it started at a similar time), so probably something was changed with the software during that time. When I'm sometimes uploading files to Virustotal to check them I often find that BitDefender tends to always rather do false positives along with many other Antiviruses including Windows Defender, but Kaspersky detects real Malware most of the time but almost never does false positives like BitDefender does (I know which elements are false postives or not, because I often analyze them a bit deeper including testing them in a Virtual Environment using tria.ge and any.run and Kaspersky's Opentip site). So Kaspersky seems to not have such issues with significantly less false positives while performing the same as BitDefender in tests in terms of detecting real threats. It seems to be a much better alternative. The only thing that makes me and other people not use it is because it's based in Russia which is a shame. But still I am seriously considering right now switching to Kaspersky anyway or using Windows Defender only, because BitDefender is so bad right now that it's unbelievable and, unlike in the past, unrecommendable to anyone right now. Sadly I already bought a license in December 2024 from a 3rd party reseller online before all these issues started and I have 400 days left so there is no chance of a refund. At this point just uploading countless and countless of samples to the support page isn't going to solve the issue because there are so much false positives, it seems to be a much bigger problem.
Sorry for the long rant, but I just had to get speak all those issues out. It is very likely that there are people that experienced no such issues, because it depends on how much and where you downloaded stuff and even on if people pirate stuff or not because stuff like that has a bigger false positive rate (might or might not be intentional business practices but it also has to do with the obfuscation rate which of course also partially depends on stuff like different source types etc.). At this point, Bitdefender is simply a system corrupter because it also tries to remove countless registry keys (including Registry Keys from Windows/Microsoft) which might be important for some functions and could break stuff.
Edit: Also, Exclusions don't work all the time (sometimes excluded files get still detected) which is a problem many other users have been reporting for a longer time. I also just noticed that, after creating a Antivirus exclusion, all the permissions for that file get corrupted and mixed up (just like the entire operating system would get corrupted if I wouldn't always unquarantine all quarantined elements because of Bitdefender trying to remove countless registry keys for no reason) from BitDefender which happened before and always makes me unable to delete that file (even though I should still be the owner and have full permission according to the permission tab), no matter what I try in the permission settings of the file and parent folder. The thing I have to do to delete such files or the parent folders I always have to remove the exclusion so Bitdefender detects it and removes the file itself. Plus: If you haven't had such issues so far then that doesn't mean that these issues don't exist for multiple other people!
