Avast finding more viruses than usual

system · 2006-10-21T08:01:07.000Z

i have been using avast recently and i read about something called keygens which are used to pirate software,i was tempted to try them out and visited many keygen sites but only for research sakes and when i tried downloading a keygen for nero 7(randomly chosen: not intentionally)
and the download started,avast detected it as a virus and also when i tried downloading “Panda Internet Security 2007”,avast detected it as a virus but i continued anyway,has this anything to do with the heuristic scanning as the keygen sites claim or is it a real virus?

FreewheelinFrank · 2006-10-21T10:10:40.000Z

Hi riskpusher4life,

Keygen/Crack sites are full of Trojans: in fact the majority of purported cracks or keygens are probably malware in disguise.

These sites are also loaded with exploits, so any vulnerability in your browser will lead to a malware infection without you even clicking ‘yes’ on a dialogue or opening a file.

These sites use social engineering to try to get you to ignore virus warnings. In other words, they try to con you into disbelieving any security warnings from anti-virus or anti-spyware programs. Don’t be a sucker: if avast! tells you there’s a virus on the site, there’s a virus!

On top of this, keygens and cracks are illegal.

Panda security products are a different issue. Panda programs contain unencrypted virus signatures which avast! will detect as a real virus. Panda products do not contain viruses. If you really want to download a Panda product, you will have to disable avast! to do so without warnings.

EDIT: As Tech pointed out, this doesn’t apply if you’re talking about downloading a copy of Panda from a warez site, where a file ostensibly a copy of a commercial program may well be a malware file; I was assuming you meant a genuine copy from the Panda website.

DavidR · 2006-10-21T10:46:49.000Z

These sites also rely on the fact that what you are doing in many countries is considered illegal so are hardly likely to report this.

Lisandro · 2006-10-21T11:35:48.000Z

riskpusher4life post:1:

Also when i tried downloading “Panda Internet Security 2007”,avast detected it as a virus but i continued anyway,has this anything to do with the heuristic scanning as the keygen sites claim or is it a real virus?

Are you referring to the legal Panda software downloaded from its site or, on contrary, a pirated copy of Panda?
The first could be a false positive, the last one, most probably, not as you can read on the other posts here.

system · 2006-10-23T12:31:40.000Z

Yes i did try to download panda internet security from the original website and when i tried to install it,it was detected as a virus

Lisandro · 2006-10-23T17:59:29.000Z

riskpusher4life post:5:

Yes i did try to download panda internet security from the original website and when i tried to install it,it was detected as a virus

Unfortunatelly, a well-known problem of Panda not encrypting its signatures

Every virus can be identified, because it contains some unique signatures. Antiviral programs have their own database of that signatures. We call this database the "virus definition file". When an antiviral program scans a file for viruses, it compares all the signatures (of all viruses) in the database with the signatures in that file. If the signatures match (they are the same), the file is marked as infected. For an antivirus program, it is important to hide this database of signatures somehow - e.g. by encrypting it. Panda Antivirus does not encrypt its virus database - the signatures inside are clearly "visible" to other antiviral programs, so they detect this file as infected (but there is actually no virus inside - only the signatures are the same).

system · 2006-10-24T11:57:21.000Z

thanks for the info,very informative and helpful and i’ll do what’s necessary to take care of the problem!!!11 ;D

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