Nirsoft's Antivirus Hall of Shame

Martin over at ghacks writes today about a recent essay posted on the Nirsoft site, discussing the issue of false positives, and ranking antivirus tools.

False positives are when an antivirus tool flags a program as being a possible malware when it really isn't.   They can be a huge pain for small developers, creating unnecessary fear among users.  And some antivirus companies are outrageously irresponsible about these kinds of detections, not explaining to the user the difference between a known malware and a complete half-assed guess about something they don't understand.

We've talked a LOT about this issue on the DonationCoder forum over the last 10 years, and have been bit by these lazy antivirus coders on more than one occasion.

Anyway, the nirsoft post goes into some detail ranking antivirus tools according to their false positives.

Full Nirsoft essay: http://blog.nirsoft....es-of-nirsoft-tools/

(see also the ghacks summary: http://www.ghacks.ne...virus-list-of-shame/)

I do think it's worth repeating what I've said many times -- I don't expect the antivirus tools to be 100% right all the time -- I understand that sometimes they want to be better safe than sorry.  But the thing is, if you want to tell a user that you have found a file that you haven no experience with, and it has some patterns that remind you of something similar you may have seen before which might be a malware, but might not, fine, i have no problem with that -- TELL THE USER WHAT YOU KNOW AND TELL THEM HOW TO GET MORE INFORMATION AND TELL THEM HOW TO LET YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE WRONG.

Just do not go throwing up a siren telling the user that malware was found in some program if you aren't damn sure it has been.