Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

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Pokun
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Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Pokun »

I don't like antivirus programs anymore. AVG or Avira doesn't seem to matter, they both keep blocking things that's clearly not viruses or other malware and lately they started to scan my own programs I made myself whenever I compile. This greatly increases testing time as I need to wait for the stupid antivirus to check the programs I made my self (sometimes from scratch) and I'm sure I didn't made them with any bad intentions. Talk about insulting! I don't need protection from myself!

Now I'm making a game in C++ and Avira keeps scanning my compiled program every single time I compile it and with its heuristic search it even sometimes detects "malware behaviour" and then blocks the file so I can't run it or test it. It said it was put into quarantine but it's not even there when I check! Not only is this beyond insulting it's also straight out lying!!

I put the file and directory under the list of exceptions but Avira doesn't seem to care about that list at all. The only thing I can do is change the name of the output file, but that only lasts until the next time Avira decides that I'm making viruses.

Have anyone else experienced similar things? What should I do? Is there any better free Antivirus programs that actually do what you tell it to do?
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Dwedit
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Dwedit »

There is Windows Defender antivirus, but some people don't like it because it doesn't detect malware well enough.
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calima
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by calima »

Move to Linux :P
tepples
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by tepples »

Provided 2 things:
  1. Linux is compatible with your PC's hardware, or you're in the market for new hardware anyway and a company like System76, Technoethical, or Purism sells the form factor you seek.
  2. You don't also use the PC for applications that have no free replacement suitable for doing your job. For example, unlike Photoshop, GIMP has no way to tell a layer to automatically rebuild itself by applying filters to the layers below it when they change.
Pokun
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Pokun »

I'm dualbooting Windows 7 and Debian and need to be able to use both for various reasons, and yeah I prefer Photoshop to Gimp (although Gimp is getting better lately). I have no problems on the Linux side, only this Windows antivirus nonsense. Maybe I'll just go with Windows Defender for a while. Or see if AVG is any better at the moment...
Sour
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Sour »

For what it's worth, I have not used AV software in well over a decade (though having upgraded to Win10 recently means I'm running Windows Defender), and I've never had any issues. AV software has never felt like they are worth the hassle, to me.

What I do:
1- Use an ad blocker, in all browsers.
2- Don't download anything from suspicious sources
3- If you absolutely must do #2, then use virustotal.com to scan and then, if you're still worried after the scan results, use Sandboxie to run it.

This can only really apply if you're the only person that ever uses that particular computer, though.
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tokumaru
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by tokumaru »

Sour wrote:For what it's worth, I have not used AV software in well over a decade (though having upgraded to Win10 recently means I'm running Windows Defender), and I've never had any issues. AV software has never felt like they are worth the hassle, to me.
Yeah, same here. AV programs slow everything down, and give tons of false positives. If I need to do something potentially dangerous, like visiting shady websites, installing/running dubious software or software I only need to use once and don't want its left overs in my system, I use a virtual machine. If all goes well for a while inside the virtual machine but using the virtual machine feels inconvenient (for performance or any other reason), I install the thing on the real machine.
Pokun
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Pokun »

Both AVG and Avira have saved me many times in the past from unexpected viruses, they used to be very good and fast (better than many antivirus programs that you had to pay for like Norton). I didn't get half as much adware as I used to and you could add exceptions to false positives. Nowadays they don't care what I put in the exception lists, they decide for me what's dangerous and don't allow me to interfere even if it's just "potential malware" (programs that could technically be used for bad things by the user) or something that the heuristics decided looks like "malware behaviour", plus they seems to be unnecessarily bloated. I don't like not having full control of my own computer (one reason I like Linux).

I do use ad-blockers but I'm not comfortable in the idea of not using an anti-virus at all. I guess Windows Defender may be good enough nowadays though. Good, free open source alternatives seems to be scarce.
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Ziggy587
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by Ziggy587 »

You could turn off the heuristics detection while you're testing your code (just remember to turn it back on after you're done).

AV software has to be constantly reevaluated. What was good a few years ago might not be good today. There's a few independent sites that test and rate AV software. I usually check AV-Test.org. Windows Defender for Windows 10 (I don't know what OS you're on), in the months of November and December, had a MUCH higher rate of false positives than AVG or Avira.

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Haven't used windows defender in a while, but when i did it gave a lot of false positives. Currently using Bitdefender which is very non-intrusive. It does seem to falsely trig on software written in Processing attempting to read files, which requires a case-for-case exception, but else it has been fine.
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thefox
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Re: Antivirus keeps blocking my home-made programs

Post by thefox »

Sour wrote:For what it's worth, I have not used AV software in well over a decade (though having upgraded to Win10 recently means I'm running Windows Defender), and I've never had any issues. AV software has never felt like they are worth the hassle, to me.
+1, except I've also disabled Windows Defender (once I found out it had automatic scanning enabled by default).
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