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Once, I was working on an intranet web tool generating .odt documents for the user to print. It worked perfectly, except on one machine, where the document cou

Once, I was working on an intranet web tool generating .odt documents for the user to print. It worked perfectly, except on one machine, where the document could be downloaded but LibreOffice raised an error when opening it. At first I though I had a bug. Checked my code, nope. Then I though maybe there is a problem with LO, but no, same version, nothing special. It worked with a document I brough from an USB disk. After an afternoon of frustration I noted Kaspersky running in the task bar, and did one last desperate attempt at finding the solution by disabling it. It worked. Inspecting the file revealed some parts were missing, Kaspersky assumed it was a malware, and not only intercepted the download, but removed silently part of the data on the fly. No alarm, no pop up, just a broken file. Disabling the antivirus was not acceptable for the client, so I created a self signed certificate, and turned https on. The virtual vigilante couldn't spy on the wire anymore, and the user could download her files, unharmed.

thrower123 5y ago
I had a development machine once that had the weirdest problem building one particular C# project. Always complaining that one particular Microsoft DLL was missing. Double check references and Nuget, everything looks right, do a full package restore, no joy. Antivirus was eating this particular DLL every time it was downloaded. I copied a bit-for-bit identical version of the file from a different machine into the correct directory, and bizarrely that worked fine.
- mort96 5y ago
  I had a very similar issue with BitDefender recently. When downloading the WebRTC C++ library, one of the submodules is harfbuzz, which contains some maliciously crafted font files used by the test suite. BitDefender automatically deletes those test files. That means git sees the repository as dirty, since files are deleted. That means WebRTC's fetch script can't run the 'git checkout' commands it expects to be able to run, and the whole download fails. While my summary here is brief, debugging this whole mess took a while.

thrower123 5y ago

I had a development machine once that had the weirdest problem building one particular C# project. Always complaining that one particular Microsoft DLL was missing. Double check references and Nuget, everything looks right, do a full package restore, no joy. Antivirus was eating this particular DLL every time it was downloaded. I copied a bit-for-bit identical version of the file from a different machine into the correct directory, and bizarrely that worked fine.

mort96 5y ago
I had a very similar issue with BitDefender recently. When downloading the WebRTC C++ library, one of the submodules is harfbuzz, which contains some maliciously crafted font files used by the test suite. BitDefender automatically deletes those test files. That means git sees the repository as dirty, since files are deleted. That means WebRTC's fetch script can't run the 'git checkout' commands it expects to be able to run, and the whole download fails. While my summary here is brief, debugging this whole mess took a while.