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I've downloaded a .zip file containing a .exe program which was created with visual studio.

So far so fine. I didn't use IE but instead chrome and it all worked.

On my hard drive I unzipped the file and tried to run it and.....

enter image description here

In essence the translation is: Windows SmartScreen blocked the execution of the program.

As I always thought that smartscreen only was checking for downloads via IE and not execution of programs already on the hard drive, I'm wondering here what is up there. Is that normal behaviour of smart screen?

(I've started signed and unsigned .exe files before and never had it pop up so it is confusing me a lot there).

Stevoisiak
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Thomas
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1 Answers1

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The blocking is caused by an NTFS stream associated with the file, based on the source the file came from (Trusted, Internet, Intranet, or Untrusted).

You can unblock the file by Right Clicking it, going to Properties, and clicking Unblock. This removes the tag against the file.

You are right in that this behaviour is usually associated with Internet Explorer. I can't say for certain, but as you downloaded it from Chrome, it would seem that Chrome also tags these files if it believe they come from an unsafe source. However, any file that contains this stream will throw the check, not just when trying to run it IE, but it's stored against the file (and any extracted files from it in the case of ZIP files and the like.)

Further reading can be found here.

Jonno
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