How to disable Bitdefender Safepay
Safepay is a virtual browsing environment that is integrated into several Bitdefender products. The main idea behind it is to provide you with a secure browsing environment for critical web activities such as online shopping or banking.
Unlike regular sandboxed applications, where an application is run in the sandbox to protect the underlying system from harm and danger, Safepay protects the web browser that it contains from the underlying system.
This is done to protect the online activities against certain forms of malware that may run on a system, including certain types of keyloggers or trojans.
What may also be interesting to some is that the premium version of Safepay can detect insecure wireless connections. If an insecure connection is noticed while using Safepay, a VPN connection is automatically established that is then used to load contents in the Safepay browser.
Turning it off
Bitdefender Safepay may be a useful feature, depending on how you are using your computer. If you do not do online banking or shopping, use other means of protection, or know what you are doing, then you may want to disable the feature instead.
A Safepay prompt is displayed on the operating system when Safepay recognizes a connection made to one of the banking sites or online shopping sites it supports.
It is interesting to note that this won't work for all sites where you would expect it to work. I did not receive prompts when I visited PayPal, eBay or Amazon for example.
That's not that much of a problem though, as you can start Safepay directly as well and use the built-in browser instead to open those sites.
Anyway, you have two options when the prompt appears:
- Remember choice for this website
- Remember choice for all banking websites
The choice is to use safepay or not. You can either turn it on automatically for this site or all sites of its type, e.g. banking websites, or disable it for the site or all sites.
There is another option, which will disable the Safepay prompt completely. You do need to start Safepay once however for it, as the preference to turn it off is only available when you start the program.
Once started, click on the settings button in the main interface, and switch "when you open an online banking website or shop online,Safepay should" from "ask me every time" to "do not use Safepay".
You can revert the change at anytime by switching the preference "ask me every time" or "turn on automatically" in the Safepay preferences.
Closing Words
It may make sense to use Bitdefender Safepay to improve security for certain Internet tasks. Especially the option to establish a secure VPN connection can be useful, but that can be achieved directly as well. And if you do not need it, you can still turn it off relatively easy.
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Martin, did you hear anything good about Sophos’ UTM Firewall Home Edition? I would love to see your review on this one but I have no idea whether this can be run in VM so in case you have no spare machine to test it then this ain’t gonna happen I know.
Hm, my friend is having problems with major slowdowns on her computer from time to time. And incidentally I installed MS Essentials on her computer. This could be a problem.
I understand S E isn’t available for Win8/8.1 because microsoft thinks defender on 8 is strong enough to not need S E. how does defender compare with other security programs?
Not good as well.
Defender is MSE on Windows 8.
http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/windows-defender.aspx
I am skeptical of AV test comparisons. The reasons for my skepticism are many. Perhaps the most meaningful one is that it is impossible to re-create real world experiences in a lab. IMPOSSIBLE!
I have used MSE for years. It is fine. Typically, other free AV products have a much heavier footprint on systems. They also have a more intrusive UX than MSE. They perform their AV function no better.
BTW, the reason you can’t install MSE in Windows 8/8.1 is because the version of Windows Defender that is incorporated into the OS includes MSE.
Is the percentage one select to be the amount of CPU which MSE is allowed, or which one wishes to reserve for other applications??
Obviously at 50% it doesn’t matter, does it, but in any other case, it does.
Yes please avoid MSE/Defender. Its filter driver causes a significant hit in CPU performance and disk I/O. I recommend using Avast or Avira’s free versions. Better protection, lighter on resources.
I was recently experiencing an extreme example of this problem – with a very high CPU usage to the point where I could hear my hard disk working very hard.
When I opened task manager and looked at the process list, I noticed that there was a file which was using abut 50% of the CPU:
MsMpEng.exeMsMpEng.exe
My first inclination was to just try and “end” the process, to see what happens – but I was denied and prevented from doing so.
So I then ran a Google search and found this link, which provided the explanation and solution:
http://techat-jack.blogspot.com/2012/09/solved-high-cpu-usage-of-microsoft.html
Open MSE – Click on Settengs and then, from the list on the left, choose “Excluded files and locations”
Browse to C:/Pprogram Files/Microsoft Security Client/MsMpEng.exe and add it to the list.
Click on Save Changes and close the program.
Apparently, MSE sees its own process as something which needs to be closely monitored — almost like a puppy dog trying to bite its own tail – and this adjustment relieves the issue.
As far as I can tell – and from the explanation on the link above – this configuration does not interfere with the proper functioning of MSE – because if it did, the configuration would fail – just like it did when I tried ending the process in Task Manager.
It’s been a few weeks now, and I have not experienced that constant high CPU usage associated with MSE — while at the same time, I have noticed it happening on occasion when the process was being called normally.
Give it a try – and I would be very interested to hear what Martin thinks about this.
Happy New Year to All
Yes, I had a client with the same issue – Security Essentials chasing its own tail. It caused a major CPU spike on her system.
I assume that the reason they do this is to protect the program from itself being compromised by malware, which does happen to AV programs occasionally.
Given that most of the major AV programs are doing poorly at detecting new malware, using a weak detector like Security Essentials is a bad idea. “Real world” results are likely to be worse than any AV test.
My comment was marked as spam? Seriously? Because I edited it?
WordPress is strange, at times.