Urgent: client.protechts.net and pingsender.exe issue

Dipto

I’ve encountered an issue and wanted to share it for feedback. and it's urgent. Here’s the situation:

Whenever I open LinkedIn from my PC browser, (Bitdefender) displays a notification. This never happened before.

Suspicious connection blocked
3 hours ago

Feature:
Online Threat Prevention

firefox.exe attempted to establish a connection relying on an unmatching security certificate to client.protechts.net. We blocked the connection to keep your data safe since the used certificate was issued for a different web address than the targeted one.

The first time it appeared was last night when I was navigating linkedin. Today, it showed up again when I accessed LinkedIn.I tried using different browsers to check: once with Firefox and once with Opera, and the notification appeared on both.I googled the issue but couldn’t be completely sure if it’s an actual problem or just a bug.While the antivirus blocked it initially, it later allowed something called "pingsender.exe."

Please let me know if this is a bug or an actual problem, and advise me on what steps I should take next.

This is urgent—please reply at your earliest convenience, as I need to resolve it. Thank you!

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Dipto,

Check if this article helps:

https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/2471/

Now, since you mentioned that this notification was triggered while you were navigating on LinkedIN, I assume this likely happens due to a subdomain they use, as we are questioning an unmatching security certificate detection.
Most regular and well known websites have sub-domain URLs used for their newsletters, promotional campaigns and the lot, for example. Sometimes, they are using certificates with another name than the domain used by the website, and this may trigger this type of notification multiple times in a short period of time. It seems it's a very common practice now. But considering this involves a trusted platform in this case, I think you can add it to exceptions.

As for the pingsender.exe allowed by the Firewall, I think you have nothing to worry about. This is a small background process associated with Mozilla Firefox. It is part of Firefox’s telemetry and crash reporting mechanism. In simple terms, its purpose is to send telemetry data. When Firefox closes or encounters an issue, pingsender.exe runs briefly in the background to send usage and performance data (so-called “pings”) back to Mozilla. By handing off the data-sending task to a separate process, Firefox itself can shut down faster without waiting to finish sending information. It is a legitimate component of Mozilla Firefox and is not malware. You’ll typically notice it in your Task Manager (on Windows) momentarily after you close or update Firefox.

If you prefer not to send telemetry data, you can adjust the telemetry and data collection settings in Firefox. However, fully disabling or removing pingsender.exe is not recommended unless you specifically want to disable all data collection—and even then, Firefox may still generate the process. Since pingsender.exe usually closes on its own, it rarely causes performance issues.

I hope the information is useful.

Regards,

Alex