What you see
A blue box in the middle of the screen:
Windows protected your PC Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognised app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.
There is a Don't run button and, at first glance, no way to continue.
Why it happens
SmartScreen is not saying the file is dangerous. It is saying it has not seen it often enough yet.
Microsoft counts, for each file, how many people have downloaded and run it, and a code-signing certificate is what carries that count from one release to the next. w0a is code-signed, so that count is no longer thrown away with every new version — but the certificate itself is new and has not built up a reputation yet, so the box still appears until enough people have run the file. It goes away on its own after a while — the same file, completely unchanged, stops being blocked the moment the count rises.
So the box is about the file not having enough history behind it yet, not about its contents.
Check the file before you continue
Do not just click through. Check it — and do the same for anything else you download from anywhere.
w0a is code-signed, so Properties → Digital Signatures carries a signature — and if the name on it is not ours, stop right there. A signature still cannot tell you which build you are holding, and that is why the fingerprint below is the check that decides.
Open PowerShell in the folder you downloaded to and run:
Get-FileHash .\w0a.exe -Algorithm SHA256The result must match the SHA-256 published in the download section of our home page, character for character.
If it does not match, stop. That file is not the one we published. Delete it and download again from w0a.app — and if you got it from somewhere else, tell us, because we would want to know.
Continuing
Once the hash matches:
- Press More info in the blue box
- A Run anyway button appears at the bottom
- Press it
w0a opens normally from there.
Why we do not just make it go away
We could not, without changing what the warning means. Reputation is earned per file, by download count, over time — there is no setting on our side that skips it.
We also would not want to tell you to click past a security warning without checking first. The check above takes thirty seconds and it is the same check that would catch a file somebody had tampered with, which is exactly the case the warning exists for.
Related
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