Avast

Mar 31, 2016

A user opened an issue on an open-source package that I maintain indicating that it was being flagged by Avast (an antivirus package) as malware. I checked that there nothing nefarious was going on, told the user that it was probably a false positive, and opened a ticket with the company to see if they could do anything about it.

They responded that it wasn’t their problem and that if I wanted to see the issue sorted out, I should open a request with them to have my package inspected and whitelisted. I declined, and asked whether they thought it was reasonable for the burden of responsibility to fall to the developer of the software that happened to fall into the wrong end of an Avast bug to jump through hoops to correct it. They asserted that it wasn’t just reasonable, but standard practice in the antivirus industry, then followed up with a trailing platitude on how user safety was their top priority.

As the lower bound of exploits becomes increasingly handled by ever more secure operating systems, and the upper bound becomes increasingly more sophisticated and harder to generally handle, I can’t help but think that this apathetic attitude might be a relic from another age. There was a time when running antivirus was so integral to the safe use of a computer that they could have demanded protection money from practically any software manufacturer, and those manufacturers would scramble to appease them. Today, with the future of antivirus being far from assured, it might be time to start rethinking these policies.

I’ve been lucky enough to have never run into this problem before, but I imagine that it must something that developers producing software for the desktop have been dealing with for ages. Has anyone else seen this problem with a project that they were shipping?

Did I make a mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.