Some of the free antivirus software like Avira and Avast have been improperly flagging our software and in doing so they do not provide the user with a notice that they have shut down our software. I guess it goes to the old saying of "You get what you pay for".
Many antivirus programs now have a secondary program that uses some type of heuristic analysis or behavioral analysis to analyze programs for unknown viruses, threats, or adware. It is usually these parts of their programs that flag our software and many others as false positives. Even after all of these years these parts of their programs flag many more false positives than what they find as valid threats and many of them do not even give you a choice to run the program or not. Some of the cheaper antivirus programs do not even warn you, they just shut the program down.
It's a problem that many vendors who use some of the advanced virtualization technologies like we do are seeing with some antivirus vendors but typically not with the big vendors like Norton and McAfee. We have never in the 10+ years of AcroPlot's existence shipped out a version that I know of that had a virus or any malware in it.
We are actively working with many of the antivirus vendors to prevent their future updates from flagging the latest versions of our software. There is nothing that they or ourselves can do about the older versions of our software but if you are on the latest version of our software and of their antivirus and you have a problem please open up a support ticket so we can contact the antivirus vendor to see why they are falsely flagging us.
AVAST Reply on 2/2/2011
Hello,
thank you for reporting this problem, it's caused by
Behavior Shield in avast! 5.1 (uninstalling this shield
should resolve this problem immediately). The fix will be
included in upcoming avast! 6.0 update (public beta is
available here
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=70655.0
- if possible, please re-test the program with this version
of avast! antivirus).
Kind Regards,
Pavel Pletanek
2nd Level Technical Support
AVAST Software a.s.
Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: WDL-308138
Department: 2nd Level Tech Supp
Priority: Default
Status: On Hold
Avira Reply on 2/15/2011
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your recent inquiry.
We could not find a virus in the attachment you have sent
us.
This is a false positive. We will take out the pattern
recognition in one of our next updates.
We thank you for your assistance.
Attachment(s) you sent:
www.cadzation.com/downloads/acroplotreprosetup.exe
www.cadzation.com/downloads/acroplotsetup.exe
--
Freundliche Gruesse / Best regards
Avira GmbH
[Name withheld per request]
Professional Support & Services
Avira GmbH
Lindauer Str. 21, D-88069 Tettnang, Germany
Internet:
http://www.avira.com