5 replies to this topic

[)-( Marchland Malady )-(]

It seems like I am the very first person to notice this, but why does AVG Anti-Virus think that Allegro Grabber has a virus in it? Does it have a virus in it, or is another program being referred to? I wish to use the program, but I can't do so if it will destroy my computer.

[Saffith]

Who knows. It manipulates .dat files; that's probably something to do with it.
It's open source, so you can see exactly what it does, if you like.

[LinktheMaster]

Oftentimes if antiviruses see applications modify files, and it doesn't know what the application is, it'll flag it as an issue.  This is pretty common behavior.  I've had applications that I've made myself come up as malware for some people (ZCManager, for example), but I can assure you I didn't put anything there.  Antiviruses just weren't familiar with the program and erred on the side of caution.

[)-( Marchland Malady )-(]

I found Allegro Grabber on this page in Allegro's website:
https://www.allegro.cc/depot/Grabber/

Thank you for your help everyone.

[LTTP]

AVG is silly at times.
I remember my AVG days...
Good times...

BitDefender now tho.

[Nicholas Steel]

It's because anti virus companies these days use heurustics to determine if something is suspicious/dangerous and when something triggers an alert from the heurustics system then it will show an alert that is usually identical in appearance to alerts used for confirmed virus detections. Heurustics is used to tell if something MIGHT be harmful, not that it is confirmed to be harmful.

 

Also the developers may be making general assumptions about some functionality that virus infested programs commonly make use of, and if a useful program makes use of those same functions then it will automatically get flagged as dangerous even though it isn't.

Edited by franpa, 06 November 2013 - 04:34 AM.