Windows 11 constantly offers new features. While most of them significantly improve the operating system, some lead to annoying bugs and worrying pop-up messages, such as this alert concerning an essential security function, the LSA.
The Local Security Authority (LSA) Protection is a Windows 11 process that prevents any code injection that could compromise credentials. In other words, it is the piece of code that validates access to all or part of a Windows system. For several days, a strange notification has been displayed on the screen of some PCs.
A message appears stating that “LSA Protection is turned off. Your device may be vulnerable.” It is even recommended to restart the system to apply the change, but it actually has no effect. This alert would not be a problem if the security function was really offline. The problem is that it appears even when LSA is enabled.
THE WINDOWS 11 ALERT MESSAGE REGARDING LSA IS DUE TO A MICROSOFT DEFENDER BUG
The alert message began to appear after the mandatory update of Microsoft Defender Antivirus KB500765. The new version of Microsoft’s antivirus was deployed at the same time as the mandatory March 2023 update for Windows 11 22H2, the KB5023706. While the latter brings many interesting new features, including a taskbar adapted to touch usage and third-party widgets, some users have complained, after applying it, of SSD slowdown on their PC and a certain slowness at startup.
Microsoft confirmed today that the annoying alert message concerning LSA deactivation is indeed due to a bug in Microsoft Defender. The good news is that it only affects systems running Windows 11 21H2 and 22H2. The bad news is that Microsoft currently only offers a temporary solution: “If you have turned on LSA Protection and restarted your device at least once, you can turn off the warning notifications and ignore any additional notifications. Important point: Currently, we do not recommend any other solutions to resolve this issue.”
