The good news is that it is not malware or spyware

Has your CPU been running at 100% lately? If you’ve gone into Task Manager in Windows and looked at your processes tab, you may have noticed a process called msmpeng.exe eating up all of your available CPU.

So what is msmpeng.exe and how do you stop it from slowing down your system? Well, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, it is not spyware or malware. It is actually quite ironic since it is associated with Windows Defender, Microsoft’s anti-virus product.

Windows Defender is an important anti-malware and antivirus program for Windows. You should only disable this program if you have installed a third-party program. In that case, Windows Defender will be disabled automatically.