There is NO virus in Behold! - Thu, 3 Dec 2009

Fieke who has been testing the Behold beta was startled yesterday. In the background was running the antivirus program Avast. Avast Antivirus seemed to think there’s a virus in Behold. Avast kept warnings coming and then shut down Behold. Not only that, but the Behold install program was also being reported as to have a virus.

Something is Behold was causing Avast to think that Behold and its install program had a virus, when I knew they didn’t. And that’s why I code sign Behold - to make sure nothing happens to it before it reaches you. Fieke checked and told me that Behold’s signature was okay.

You couldn’t imagine my horror upon hearing that. Having that happen to your program is as bad as Tiger Wood’s little escapade the other day. The damage is irreparable.

I went to Avast’s online scanner and submitted Behold myself. Sure enough, it reported that Behold.exe was infected with Win32:Delf-MZG [Trj].

I immediately shot off an email to Avast. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a prompt response that said:

It was a false alarm of Avast virus database 091203-0. It was fixed in the latest virus database update, please update virus database. We deeply apologize for the problem.

Well that certainly made me feel better. Fieke let me know when Avast next updated its new virus database, the reporting of a virus was fixed. Today I went back to the Avast’s online scanner and sure enough, Behold is now reported as clean.

So after a heart numbing affair, I now find that a search on Google for: win32:delf-mzg [trj] gives a good number of “false positives” with Avast reporting every program from Skype to Spybot to a host of others. Avast had to fix this, because the mistake would ultimately have caused them even more anguish than they did me. Here’s one of the typical reports on this by Andrew Wee just posted today.

This is what programming’s all about. There’s always something new creeping up that you never expect. Avast, me hearties.