I have had a game installed on my game system for almost a year. (Jewel Quest III)
a couple of days ago, Avast all of a sudden (while I was playing the game) said that it had a trojan
and deleted the executable for the game.
I reinstalled the game (from a CD that I created back when I first purchased the game)
from the installation file, and Avast deleted it as soon as it was extracted to be installed.
how can I prevent Avast from deleting this file that I know is clean? I tried adding an exception for both the file itself & the folder it is installed in,
but as soon as I try to play the game, Avast deletes it.
First avast doesn’t delete anything it alerts to infection and pops-up an interactive screen for the users to choose the action to take. The Home free version doesn’t have any autonomous actions and the Pro version which has, the user has to set it up as to what action/s to take on detection.
What is the infected file name, where was it found e.g. (C:\windows\system32\infected-file-name.xxx) ?
Check the avast! Log Viewer (right click the avast ‘a’ icon), Warning section, this contains information on all avast detections. C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashLogV.exe
If your exception isn’t working you are either putting it in the wrong location (program files, exclusions and not the on-access scanner, see below) or you are getting the full path to the file incorrect.
You should always confirm the detection - check the offending/suspect file at: VirusTotal - Multi engine on-line virus scanner and report the findings here the URL in the Address bar of the VT results page. You can’t do this with the file securely in the chest, you need to extract it to a temporary (not original) location first, see below.
Create a folder called Suspect in the C:\ drive, e.g. C:\Suspect. Now exclude that folder in the Standard Shield, Customize, Advanced, Add, type (or copy and paste) C:\Suspect* That will stop the standard shield scanning any file you put in that folder. You should now be able to export any file in the chest to this folder and upload it to VirusTotal without avast alerting.
it has been considered clean on every system that I have installed it on, up to a couple of days ago.
My one System that I have NOD32 installed on, detects nothing and lets the game run.
all other systems (5 in total) have Avast on them, which HAS deleted the file (moved the exe to the virus vault).
As a workaround, you can add these files to the Standard Shield provider (on-access scanning) exclusion list.
Left click the ‘a’ blue icon, click on the provider icon at left and then Customize. Go to Advanced tab and click on Add button…
You can use wildcards like * and ?. But be careful, you should ‘exclude’ that many files that let your system in danger.
I would suggest that you send the sample to avast (the how to report and exclude from scans link I gave.) as a possible false positive as some are reporting it is a packed malware name which could be prone to misidentification and one detecting as suspicious (heuristic detection), which are more prone to FP. GData uses avast as one of its two scanners, so that can be treated as one detection rather than two.
Whilst Kaspersky isn’t noted for FPs there are many other AVs that are not detecting anything when their detections as normally reasonable.
my SMTP server doesn’t allow zip file attachments,
so I had to use winRar to send it as a rar file attachment instead it is password protected, and everything except the file type is according to the directions given
Zip is just a generic term, .zip, .rar, .7z any password protected archive is fine.
Thou you could have added it to the User Files section of avast (a copy remains in the original location) and sent it from there, now it gets uploaded to avast during the avast update process (no need to zip or password protect and that is covered by avast).