FP: aawservice.exe PROCESSES misidentified as Trojans

Viruses and worms
1

I have Avast 5 Free and Adaware 8.3 Free.

Ad-Watch (AdAware’s real-time shield, aawservice.exe) is running a group of 14 processes.

Avast misidentifies all 14 processes as 13 different Trojans and 1 HTML I-Frame gen.

AdAware itself and Malwarebytes report clean processes.

The file aawservice.exe is clean (according to VirusTotal and Avast itself). Only the processes that this CLEAN file is running are misidentified as INFECTED! How can a CLEAN file run INFECTED processes???

Thank you for any help you can render.

Y.

2

I guess this happens when you scan the memory with avast…!??
asyn

3

Well I wouldn’t call them false positives when you set loose a signature based scan, it will find them if you have it scam memory in the custom scan that you used.

These are locations in memory, related to adaware having placed unencrypted virus signatures in memory, so there is no file to actually perform any action on. It isn’t saying aawservice.exe is infected but that is the process responsible for placing them in memory.

Personally I wouldn’t give AdAware hard disk space as it is a much depreciated application now and for me committing a sin in placing unencrypted virus signatures in memory where another security application looking for virus signatures would find them.

4

+1
asyn

5

I wholeheartedly agree: unencrypted signatures are a NO-NO!!!

I somewhat disagree regarding the benefits of using Ad-Aware, but this debate is not for this forum or this thread.

Am running MBAM, too, of course. Unfortunately they have no resident shield.

You have helped a lot! Thanks.

Y.

6

You’re welcome…!
asyn

7

MBAM has Website Blocking in the paid version.

I am with DavidR

Personally I wouldn’t give AdAware hard disk space as it is a much depreciated application now and for me committing a sin in placing unencrypted virus signatures in memory where another security application looking for virus signatures would find them.