Okay, so we’re mid-way through a pretty hefty migration from a legacy AV to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint across our dev and staging environments. The usual growing pains, but one thing is driving our developers up the wall.
Our devs have a suite of custom-built internal tools—mostly Go binaries and Python scripts that do everything from data wrangling to automated deployments. Defender is flagging about 30% of these as malware or “suspicious behavior,” especially when they interact with the network or spawn subprocesses. It’s creating massive friction in their daily workflows; they either get blocked outright or have to stop and file exceptions constantly.
We’ve tried the obvious:
* Adding the tools' directories to the exclusion list (file path, process path)
* Created an indicator to allow the file hashes
But it feels like whack-a-mole. As soon as they rebuild a binary (which is often), the hash changes and we’re back to square one. The behavior-based detection is still catching some of them even with path exclusions.
Has anyone else navigated this during a rollout? I’m especially curious about:
* Is there a more sustainable way to trust these internal tools without disabling critical detection features?
* Any experience with using the “custom network indicators” or configuring ASR rules more granularly for dev environments?
* Did you have to adjust the Defender sensitivity levels for certain device groups, and did that open up other risks?
Our security team is understandably hesitant to just blanket-exclude entire folders or turn off features like ASR. Looking for that sweet spot where dev velocity doesn’t get murdered but we’re not creating a huge blind spot. What worked (or spectacularly failed) in your environments? 🧐