[strouprob]

I just want to hear others thoughts on this subject. I have read a couple of articles that state the possibility of Anti Virus software providing and cleaning viruses that were never there just to appear to be doing its job. I personally think that is a stretch. I mean what development company has time to provide for this kinda functionality?

Anyway, What do you think??

[pfurball]

Hi strouprob
I have often wondered that question myself!! I recently changed security suites, (I was offered a free version by my ISP) and regularly update all my antispyware/antivirus programmes so as to keep my computer clean, don't willingly visit nasty sites or download from unknown sources and run the occasional online scan and my previous security suite said my computer was clean and free from any nasties. The first thing the new security suite produced was a trojan downloader and a win32 virus that it had detected and that I had to delete.I ran a quick HiJackThis and it said my system was clean as did all the other programmes I run to protect my stuff.Makes you wonder....
Regards Paula :S

[strouprob]

Your story makes a good argument. I have never had the chance to test this theory out. Thanks for the reply.

[Byteman]

Hi

Just about every legitimate, decent, or however you describe the top respected security softwares.....produce false positives to some degree.

The more thoroughly they sniff the system the more of the false detections there may be- for example, heuristic scanning (which can be toggled in some antivirus apps) will produce these, for common parts of third party software.

Many of the malware tools we use here and at other forums, act in a way that triggers security detection> but that are safe and not doing harm. For example, Scripting alerts by Norton and other AV/s--- it depends on just what is going on whether this is a bad, or "good" alert and the user has to know how to respond to them.

If you go to any of the top antivirus company forums where users and techs from these companies toss ideas around, you will see tons of questions, help, etc with false positives.

Not to mention, the unintentional incorrect detections that do come up rarely- for example,just a few weeks ago, Kaspersky detected Windows Explorer as a "baddie" and if the user had it set this way>>quarantined explorer! For some unlucky ones, that file was deleted.

NO legitimate security program produces "stretched" detections- but there are plenty of low quality, copycat, and outright fraudulent programs found. These we call "Rogues" and there is a whole place devoted to them:

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm

[strouprob]

Byteman,

Thanks for the infor