Gavin D Staveley wrote:
I am not sure if you submit your new versions of software to antivirus companies before you roll them out?
No. That would be a nightmare.
Below I'm going to paste what I wrote to another user that had problems with the software because of Norton (which I suspect is also using a kind of 'reputation' based scheme):
I grew pretty skeptical of most anti-virus software over the years, as many of them just end up causing more problems than they actually solve, especially when they employ simplistic solutions to very complex problems (and end up throwing the baby out with the bath water).
For instance, when the ransomware craze started some AV engines decided that ANY software writing to ANY folder under Public Documents (perfectly legit folder to store data) could only be malware trying to encrypt user data (!). As if that is not bad enough, they would then SILENTLY (i.e. without telling the user what they were doing) prevent the application from writing to its own data folders, which would obviously break it while leaving the user totally clueless as to why that particular application was no longer working properly (must be a bug in the application itself, right? Lol).
You even have a real life example from this user
HERE where BitDefender decided to QUARANTINE Explorer.exe (!) because he was using Windows Explorer to delete some files in the Documents folder!
Others would flag ANY software that used a specific (and very legal) Windows API to check on user keystrokes as Keyloggers (Winstep software, for instance, uses this API call to detect keyboard activations of docks, to launch items via a hot key, etc). Not every application listening in on user keystrokes is a keylogger as doing this can have a multitude of legit purposes, but some of these AV engines seem to think they can only be up to no good.
Then you have obscure newcomers like Bkav Pro down at VirusTotal, which is Vietnamese or Russian, not quite sure. I really have no idea why VirusTotal includes such unknown and flawed engines, as Bkav Pro apparently keeps flagging EVERYTHING as suspicious or malware lol. I really think VirusTotal should exclude certain engines if their false positive rates exceed a certain threshold.
Personally I use ESET Smart Security and I am very happy with them, it never did any of the silly stuff I mentioned above (and whenever you hear news about new malware findings, etc, you will probably see ESET mentioned in the news as well, as they are at the forefront of IT security). And no, I’m not a shareholder for ESET lol