Program sometimes flagged as virus

Question

Why is it that sometimes my program is flagged as a virus for some anti-virus software, when it's not?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/993671/accidentally-created-a-virus — Josh Lee, Mar 19 '10 at 05:19

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:19

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Are you talking about false positives?

answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:19

Anton Gogolev

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:45

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May be your program contains some code snippets which are considered as VIRUS code by anti-virus programs.

answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:45

Nirmal Singh Raja Reegan

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 19 '10 at 07:14

Antivirus protection systems often use heuristic algorithms that may give false postivies sometimes. Maybe your program has a certain set of suspicious function calls, specific low-level instructions or whatnot. Networking is likely to cause an antivirus alarm as well :)

Program sometimes flagged as virus

3 Answers3