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I am learning how to code in C++ and at the moment I am creating some basic programs that calculate something or generally do anything connected with math. So, I am using Code:Blocks for this and every time I compile a harmless program, my antivirus, Bitdefender, detects it as a virus and immediately deletes it. I have tried putting it on whitelist but I often make programs and having to whitelist every directory or program takes too much time. Can somebody explain to me why does Bitdefender, which I bought and which usually works fine is mistakenly detecting a harmless file as a virus? (The virus is described as

Gen:Variant.Ursu.'number'

Sniipex
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  • It's probably not as harmless as you claim it to be. Or it's genuinely a false positive. Just whitelist your development root directory in which you store your applications. – CodeCaster Feb 27 '20 at 16:19
  • What the program does is, you input 6 numbers, 3 for the hours and 3 for the minutes and then it outputs whether those times were inside a specific time period I set or not, so it couldn't really do anything besides output "Yes" or "No". I did whitelist the directory as you said, thank you for the answer. – Sniipex Feb 27 '20 at 16:35
  • Your problem is very common. I've had several different developed programs detected as a virus. My only conclusion is that it's because anti-virus programs are garbage. You can use virustotal.com to check your programs against many different anti-virus engines. – Jesper Dec 06 '20 at 12:15

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The vast majority of users (of an anti-virus program) will never run a legitimate/safe program that the anti-virus hasn't seen before (less true for people on this site).

Whereas much malware is polymorphic, altering itself every time it is deployed.

Therefore a useful heuristic for an anti-virus is to block all executables the first time they are seen. Unfortunately this hits software developers rather hard. Fortunately this group is likely to be able to work out how to use exclusions to help themselves.

Douglas Leeder
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