False alarms

What are false alarms?

A false alarm is another way of saying ‘mistake’. As applied to the
field of anti-virus programs, a false alarm occurs when the program
mistakenly flags an innocent file as being infected. This may seem
harmless enough, but false alarms can be a real nuisance.
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You waste productivity due to user down-time.

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You may take e-mail offline, as a security precaution, thus
causing a backlog and more lost productivity



You waste even more time and resources in futile attempts to
disinfect ‘infected’ files. And if you load a backup, to replace
‘infected files, the backup appears to be infected too.

In short, false alarms can be costly nuisances.
The term is not confined just to the anti-virus world. It also applies,
for example on Trojan protection and anti-malware. This too could be
very costly, for example an e-mail that marks as may be a business
critical message.

Why do false alarms appear?
Difficult to say only one main reason of false alarms, but usual of
them are following:
- the one of the main purposes of protection systems – make it
harder to analyze, reverse and crack the application. Malware
(virus) makers are also very often use protection systems to
protect viruses to make them difficult to analyze. So antivirus

2

- Software vendors sometimes wrongly detect virus in any
protected files, for example, if last days there were lot of
protected viruses
-

Heuristic and generic analyzers of antivirus software may
often fail, because these are robot, and automatic robot
detections can’t give us 100% result

- Just an error of antivirus software engineers, which may
wrongly analyze and detect virus in protected file.

Examples of false alarms

AVG blocked by 9 AV softwares

3

Kaspersky blocked by 6 AV softwars

4

Eset Nod32 Blocked Adobe

Eset Nod32 Blocked Messenger Plus

5

AVG Detecting Itself as Malicious

Windows false detect Skype

6

What you can do?
There is no magic formula to solving the false alarm problem;
Our best advice is to look for trusted seal or seal approval of some
antivirus software.
Logically, Antivirus software will not risk their credibility by giving
trusted seal or seal approval without a thorough examination.
Here is a thumb rule for you: When a product is marked as trusted
seal by one of the major Anti-Virus software, and is caught by
different Anti-Virus software – then you know it's a false alarm.

Most common software and web-site that get false alarms
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Babylon
Imesh
Avg
MindAds
Conduit
MediaWhite
WebMedia
Yield_Ads
Mediashakers
Rubicon
WebMedia
Batanga
Baba_Network
Ilivid
Ask.com
StartMeApp
7

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Ad-mange
Pubfit
Mari Media
Installerex
Manage
Whitesmoke
Comoddo
Adacive
Adperium
E-viral
DeliAds
Jumba
Mango
Media888
OpenX
Saymedia
Web3

‫דשגןן‬

8

False alarms

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