Notably, there is no official “Exclusion Tool v1.4” from Microsoft—this is likely a third-party tool from GitHub, MajorGeeks, or a developer like or Sordum (though Sordum has a separate “Defender Exclusions Tool” with different versioning).
Third-party tools like Defender Control v2.1 remain popular because they bypass these limitations (e.g., Tamper Protection) until Microsoft patches the method.
Manually adding exclusions in Windows Settings is tedious—you have to click through multiple layers for every single file. Exclusion Tool v1.4 simplifies this:
) is a companion utility that simplifies the process of adding files or folders to Defender's "whitelist". Defender Control - Free Download