How to disable Windows Defender in Windows 11 - News Block

In this article, I will show you how you can disable Windows Defender on your Windows 11.

Before starting, just a disclaimer: This may be a little different compared to what you were used to before when you disabled Windows Defender or Windows Security in Windows 10, since Windows 11 has stricter security measures before you can disable it.

Now let’s get started!

First, go to the Start menu and type in the search bar “System settings” and open that app. We are going to boot into a safe mode boot option, so go to the Boot tab. You will see Boot options so make sure to check Secure Boot and set it to a minimum. Press the Apply button and the OK button.

After that, you just need to click “Exit without restarting” just to confirm that Windows Security is currently running on the computer. You can go back to the start menu and find the Windows security app.

As you will see, the virus and threat protection will show that it is activated. Therefore, you will need to restart your computer so that we can disable that Windows security feature in our Windows 11.

After restarting your computer, you will now be put into safe mode on your Windows 11. So now you can go ahead and change some settings in the registry.

Disable Windows Defender using the registry

Go to the Start menu, right click on it and select the run option. Write there “regedit“, press the OK button and you will be shown the registry editor window. Now you will go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder and proceed to SYSTEM file. Then look for the current control set folder and under that is the Services folder, where we will be disabling particular services.

Under the Services folder, we are going to scroll down until we find the “Sense“. Click on it and we will go changing the home key, which you will find on the right side. Open the Home key and change the value to “4” under the hexadecimal base and press the OK button. These particular steps will be repeated as we go along.

Going back to the left side column, we are going to look for the “Wd Boot” file. Just like before, we’re going to click on the Home key and change the value to “4” with hexadecimal as a base, then click OK.

Next, in the left side column, look for the “FilterWd“. Repeat the process of changing the value on the Home key as we did before.

After that, it will search for “WdNisDrv” and repeat the same process.

You will be following the same steps with the “WdNisSvc” file.

Finally, repeat the process again for the “WinDefend” file.

Finally, we have now successfully disabled Windows Defender in Windows 11.

In case you want to re-enable your Windows Defender, here are the default registry key values you’ll need to re-enter:

Sense – 3
Start Wd -0
Wd Filter – 0
WdNisDrv – 3
WdNisServc – 3
Win Defend – 2

Disable safe mode: boot in normal mode

You can now close Registry Editor and return to the Start menu. Right-click on it, select the Run button and type “incorrect configuration” and press ok. Go to the Boot tab and disable Secure Boot in the Boot options. Press the Apply button and the OK button. Then restart your computer.

Now, now we are back to the normal mode in Windows 11.

For us to check if we have successfully disabled Windows Security or Windows Defender on our Windows 11 operating system, go back to the Start menu, search for “windows security” and open that app.

You will notice that Virus & Threat Protection will simply hang on “Get protection info…” and will never load the Windows Security service on your computer.