![]() ![]() Want to add an installer option as well as the simple executable? That's new code so you need to whitelist with everyone again. Some distributors require a completely clean scan on VirusTotal which means that even if 69/70 virus scanners deem it clean you need to track down the one random Chinese antivirus provider who has a problem with it, and needless to say only has a website in Mandarin, to try to submit a ticket asking them to fix it.Įven once you're whitelisted that only applies to the specific executable. McAfee only accepts submission by email and has a bunch of different similarly named virus products which are difficult to work out. Lots of them have really easy and organised processes to submit this and are very pro active (Microsoft and Malwarebytes generally fix within a few hours) but some of them are super painful. This is despite paying for a signature which I use to digitally sign the executables.įixing this as a developer involves submitting the code to each antivirus provider and asking them to review it and whitelist it as a false positive. I produce a very simple piece of software (less than 200 lines of code) but because it is compiled from Python and involves outgoing network connections it frequently (ie always) gets flagged by antivirus as malware.Įach time I compile a new version (even a tiny minor upgrade) Virustotal will show it as flagged as malware by between 2 and 10 antivirus products. Bypassing AV instead by hiding the malware so that the AV cannot properly see it, is much easier though.Īs a software developer, I can confirm that false positives happen a lot. This was especially bad since many of these AV did there analysis as system user. In the past there were several cases of AV being vulnerable to code execution attacks, often due to errors in parsing (deliberately corrupted) files. Not trivial but possible for a determined attacker with enough knowledge and time. Along with that, how easy it is to corrupt antivirus. You are not totally safe from malware if you install an AV (or use the existing AV built into Windows) but the average user is usually much safer than without an AV. If you mean with "rely on them" that the AV results are true in most cases then then yes. If you mean with "rely on them" that you blindly believe the results then no. and if it is too common, can we really rely on them. the more innocent files will be detected as malware). the more malware they detect) the more false positives they will also produce (i.e. And models or heuristics can usually be tuned how much false positives and negatives they produce - only the less false negatives they produce (i.e. False negatives (malware not detected) on the other hand will have a serious security impact too. If there are too much the user will disable the detection completely. These heuristics (or machine learning models) are tuned by the vendor for some specific balance between false positive and false negatives rate. This is because only parts of the malware is detected by clear signatures, the rest is detected by heuristics which will never be perfect. The results differ between vendors and time but on average can be said that the higher the detection rate (true positive) the higher will be the more false alarms will be triggered (false positive). Often antivirus programs trigger a false alarm that a certain file is corrupted or infected. ![]()
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