Virus detection

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Hondata
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Virus detection

Post by Hondata »

Some anti-virus software falsely detects a virus in our software.

Sometimes the symptom is a message like 'cannot start' when you try to run the software, which means the anti-virus software has deleted our application behind your back.

The first point to make is that there is no virus. Both the main application executable (eg KManager.exe) and the installation executable (eg KManager-1-2-4.exe) have digital certificates signed by Hondata. If the files are altered in any way then the certificates are marked as invalid. If you are unsure as to whether our software contains a virus, then right click on the file, access 'Digital Signatures' then click on 'Hondata Inc'. It should mention 'The digital signature is ok'. If any single bit of the file is altered, then it will say 'The digital signature is invalid'. In the whole history of Hondata we have never released any application infected with malware at any point.

We recommend using only the built in Windows security software, which works well, doesn't false positive and doesn't slow down the PC.

Otherwise we offer no support on how to get third party security software to accept our applications, other than for some anti-virus software adding exclusions does not work and the anti-virus software needs to be uninstalled.

The historical background is that for a long time Hondata would routinely check that our software was not falsely detected as malicious with over 70 anti-virus vendors. If it was flagged then most anti-virus vendors had a way to issue a support ticket to ask for an exception for falsely flagged software. Some do not. This was very time consuming because it had to be done for every software release from Hondata and also from the anti-virus vendor. Eventually some anti-virus makers told us they would stopped issuing exceptions for our software and others would ignore us.

We even went to the trouble of setting up and using software taggants in our applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_taggant). This is an additional signing and verification step to ensure the issuer of an application is legitimate and genuine as well as the usual digital signature verifying the application is unaltered and genuine. The anti-virus industry did not widely adopt the use of software taggants and the servers were shut down in 2018.

At that point we decided we had better things to spend our time on.
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