We have an application that our clients would like to use for their daily work, but recently Avast (and other antivirus software) started doing some rather nasty things.
By which I mean silently taking files (we have a few .exe and a few .dll files that we need), or silently blocking the main exe from running at all. Keyword here being: silently.
There’s no pop-up that it had found a virus. The files work fine with Avast disabled. The files are detected to be clean when Avast is asked to check the directory.
How about telling us what the problem is instead of silently doing stuff?
We’ll look into this more precisely the next time we have access to the machine. No idea about the avast client’s version, but the virus definitions are the newest. My coworker said it was win8 or win10.
All the files we ship in this thing (it’s an ActiveState self-hosting executable, no installer, it just extracts various dlls and shipped files and executables during run) are also virus-free (and still more often than it’s comfortable, they either get silently blocked from running, or silently quarantined; or when run separately also get sent for analysis and blocked, even though they had been run before from within the main software).
Adding the directory that holds the shipped files to the white list doesn’t help with the default settings of Avast, and we can’t expect all our users to mess around with the antivirus settings.
Avast Support recommended using some Uninstall Tool I had never heard about to uninstall the old Avast and then install a new one — that was kinda strange, but whatever. Windows’ built-in uninstall has always been sufficient.
I’m not sure what else we could do to not trigger heuristics simply due to our software not being used by millions of people.
On my test system (a Windows 7), here’s the current versions of Avast: