5 ms·

The business of antivirus, especially, has a huge incentive to shove it IN YOUR FACE that the software is detecting things whether they're false positives or no

by jconley 15y ago

The business of antivirus, especially, has a huge incentive to shove it IN YOUR FACE that the software is detecting things whether they're false positives or not. This scares people into re-upping their subscription. Most computer users don't understand there can even be such a thing as false positive. For all those support calls you get, there are probably 10x that number that simply take the security software on its word and let it delete/block your application. An aptly timed popup from the antivirus vendor will appear shortly thereafter asking the user to pre-purchase 2 more years of complete computer protection! Oh, the business of fear mongering. . . EDIT: This is one of those very hard problems startups should be solving.

jgmmo 15y ago
It's flat out wrong of you to say that antivirus companies don't care about FP's. There are over 25k new malware samples coming out daily, and everybody is just trying to cut through them as fast and efficiently as possible. Yes there are innocent casualties of this -- False positives -- but these are sincere mistakes . False positives are very embarrassing for the security company. It is something that can even cause people their jobs. Don't you think for a second that these are not looked at. I make malware definitions for a living, and you can trust me when I say that I check the FP reports first thing every morning, several times during the work day, & I check our forums every night at home to make sure we don't have any FP's rolling in. At most security software companies, FP's taken very seriously & I know that personally I would love to be able to educate Indie developers about what triggers detections and ways we can both work together to reduce them. It's easier said then done, however, and also it is delicate info that you don't really want to yell off the rooftops - because malware creators could really use the same info to their advantage.
- jconley 15y ago
  I didn't say the industry doesn't care. But, the business model relies on detecting as much as possible and shoving that in your face to get more bookings. I have no doubt you take false positives very seriously at an engineering level. However, the bottom line impact of a false positive on some indie software has to be negligible.
- icehawk 15y ago
  All of this. False positives are horrible for both antivirus companies and their customers, and great care is typically taken to avoid them. Not to mention that if you start alerting the user too much, they'd start tuning out the alerts; that becomes a big problem if and when they're infected with something.
- pasbesoin 15y ago
  I'll respond with a variation of what naner describes ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511551 ). Specifically with Norton, I've received warnings/quarantines where it's rather non-obvious and difficult to learn what the actual problem is. The program's interface allows one to click and drill down one or two levels, but the descriptions are often more non-descriptive than descriptive. And then one faces a link (which is, by the way, not tooltipped or otherwise designated as a link) that fires up your browser and takes you to a web page on the security software vendor's (in this case, Norton) web site. Well, that's f-ing annoying. And then, to boot, often the page that is navigated to contains content that is little or no more helpful in telling you what specifically they detected or why specifically the warning/action triggered. I recall one case in particular, where going through all this and reading between the lines, it appeared that the quarantine was the result of a "reputation" trigger. Norton wasn't familiar with the executable and it didn't have much or any presence in their reputation system, so the default action was to flag it a "high security" risk and to "quarantine" it. I understand there is a balancing act. If you don't keep it simple and use strong enough language, Joe Blow user may start to disregard the warnings, until soon enough s/he has a real problem. But as a more advanced user, this is completely frustrating. I want to know what the problem is, so that I can make an informed decision with regard to the "security event". (And yes, on the Windows machine, I do run Norton. Comes with my only Internet connectivity option, anyway, and it makes an acceptable, and useful, component of a layered defense.)
  - joe_bleau 15y ago
    I got bit by this reputation thing just this morning. I'd sent out a link to a .exe for a dead simple app (open serial port, tx commands, rx replies, output to screen) and sure enough, someone tried to download it and got blocked by Norton. I sent it in as a FP, not in the hopes they'll do anything about my little .exe, but just to make more work for them.
- pnathan 15y ago
  I wrote a Windows program for my dad about a year ago. It would have worked great. I was thinking about selling it, actually! Except, the antivirus flagged it. I called the AV vendor and they (probably the first-line tech support) said unless that my dad called the vendor, they could do nothing. The only false positive that might be remotely reasonable is my executable name is identical to a virus. rte.exe or something similar, as I recall. Whatever. A binary difference should have demonstrated substantial difference between my exe and the virus. So, my dad didn't get his program, and I got left with a renewed awareness that AV vendors are ruinously unhelpful, and I'd rather work on moving my family and friends to Linux or OSX.
  - jff 15y ago
    So you spent the time to write a program, one good enough to consider selling it even, but couldn't be bothered to try changing the executable name? Or ask your dad to call the AV vendor? Am I mis-reading you?
    - pnathan 15y ago
      I did ask my dad to call. Nothing seemed to come of it. I was working in a hurry and didn't think to simply change the exe name, making the presumption that such a simple thing shouldn't influence the AV decision.
      - jgmmo 15y ago
        The name of the .exe certainly matters. When going through airport security, do you think it matters at all if your name is Osama Bin Laden? Such a person is going to experience a much larger degree of scrutiny from TSA then a person named John Smith.
        SomeOtherGuy 15y ago
        That's a great example, as it shows anti-virus scammers are just as bad as the airport security scammers. Someone being named Osama Bin Laden has no bearing on their likelihood of hijacking a plane.
tjoff 15y ago
Which is why MS Security Essentials really is a fresh breath of air compared to everything else (that I've tried).
joering2 15y ago
"Oh, the business of fear mongering." couldnt agree more. I am using PC with XP/7 for years now and never had a virus. I go online into some questionable websites and downloads sometimes but if user uses a common sense, he wont open that AllPrinterDrivers.exe from unknown source just to install drivers to his printer. I never needed and I think I never will need an AV.
- freehunter 15y ago
  Until you get hit with a zero-day browser exploit that doesn't need you to install an exe to run.
  - politician 15y ago
    Question: if he's hit with a zero-day exploit, how does having AV installed help?
    - jgmmo 15y ago
      Answer: Good definitions are crafted so that are intended to detect not only all existing versions seen but also allows room for change and file characteristic changes so that future versions of the malware family can be caught with the same definition. Good definitions will go on killing items in the wild well past the date the initial zero-day came out (the one that caused the need for the definition in the first place). This is why brand new generations of malware drop and they are detected by a few security guys. This is also why some people have huge #'s of FP's -- because they allow so much room for flexibility to catch future malware - that they accidentally kill off legit files in the process.
      - politician 15y ago
        Well, ok, that makes sense; I thought the OP was trying to say that AV provides protection against brand new zero-day exploits which seems like wishful thinking.
gus_massa 15y ago
A false positive is very bad for the AV Company if the file is part of the OS of a lot of computes. For example; AVG update bricks Windows 7 (Dec 2010): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/avg_auto_immune_update/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/avg_auto_immune_upda... McAfee update shutting down XP machines (Apr 2010): http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xp-machines/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-d...
jmcqk6 15y ago
A lot of virus protection software seems like the electronic equivalent of [protection racket](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket). They throw up these scary pop-ups that basically say "this is a nice computer you have isn't it? It would be... terrible if something were to happen to it, wouldn't it?" Interestingly, the best AV I've found seems to be the one from microsoft.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

by jconley 15y ago

jgmmo 15y ago

It's flat out wrong of you to say that antivirus companies don't care about FP's. There are over 25k new malware samples coming out daily, and everybody is just trying to cut through them as fast and efficiently as possible. Yes there are innocent casualties of this -- False positives -- but these are sincere mistakes . False positives are very embarrassing for the security company. It is something that can even cause people their jobs. Don't you think for a second that these are not looked at. I make malware definitions for a living, and you can trust me when I say that I check the FP reports first thing every morning, several times during the work day, & I check our forums every night at home to make sure we don't have any FP's rolling in. At most security software companies, FP's taken very seriously & I know that personally I would love to be able to educate Indie developers about what triggers detections and ways we can both work together to reduce them. It's easier said then done, however, and also it is delicate info that you don't really want to yell off the rooftops - because malware creators could really use the same info to their advantage.

jconley 15y ago
I didn't say the industry doesn't care. But, the business model relies on detecting as much as possible and shoving that in your face to get more bookings. I have no doubt you take false positives very seriously at an engineering level. However, the bottom line impact of a false positive on some indie software has to be negligible.
icehawk 15y ago
All of this. False positives are horrible for both antivirus companies and their customers, and great care is typically taken to avoid them. Not to mention that if you start alerting the user too much, they'd start tuning out the alerts; that becomes a big problem if and when they're infected with something.
pasbesoin 15y ago
I'll respond with a variation of what naner describes ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511551 ). Specifically with Norton, I've received warnings/quarantines where it's rather non-obvious and difficult to learn what the actual problem is. The program's interface allows one to click and drill down one or two levels, but the descriptions are often more non-descriptive than descriptive. And then one faces a link (which is, by the way, not tooltipped or otherwise designated as a link) that fires up your browser and takes you to a web page on the security software vendor's (in this case, Norton) web site. Well, that's f-ing annoying. And then, to boot, often the page that is navigated to contains content that is little or no more helpful in telling you what specifically they detected or why specifically the warning/action triggered. I recall one case in particular, where going through all this and reading between the lines, it appeared that the quarantine was the result of a "reputation" trigger. Norton wasn't familiar with the executable and it didn't have much or any presence in their reputation system, so the default action was to flag it a "high security" risk and to "quarantine" it. I understand there is a balancing act. If you don't keep it simple and use strong enough language, Joe Blow user may start to disregard the warnings, until soon enough s/he has a real problem. But as a more advanced user, this is completely frustrating. I want to know what the problem is, so that I can make an informed decision with regard to the "security event". (And yes, on the Windows machine, I do run Norton. Comes with my only Internet connectivity option, anyway, and it makes an acceptable, and useful, component of a layered defense.)
- joe_bleau 15y ago
  I got bit by this reputation thing just this morning. I'd sent out a link to a .exe for a dead simple app (open serial port, tx commands, rx replies, output to screen) and sure enough, someone tried to download it and got blocked by Norton. I sent it in as a FP, not in the hopes they'll do anything about my little .exe, but just to make more work for them.
pnathan 15y ago
I wrote a Windows program for my dad about a year ago. It would have worked great. I was thinking about selling it, actually! Except, the antivirus flagged it. I called the AV vendor and they (probably the first-line tech support) said unless that my dad called the vendor, they could do nothing. The only false positive that might be remotely reasonable is my executable name is identical to a virus. rte.exe or something similar, as I recall. Whatever. A binary difference should have demonstrated substantial difference between my exe and the virus. So, my dad didn't get his program, and I got left with a renewed awareness that AV vendors are ruinously unhelpful, and I'd rather work on moving my family and friends to Linux or OSX.
- jff 15y ago
  So you spent the time to write a program, one good enough to consider selling it even, but couldn't be bothered to try changing the executable name? Or ask your dad to call the AV vendor? Am I mis-reading you?
  - pnathan 15y ago
    I did ask my dad to call. Nothing seemed to come of it. I was working in a hurry and didn't think to simply change the exe name, making the presumption that such a simple thing shouldn't influence the AV decision.
    - jgmmo 15y ago
      The name of the .exe certainly matters. When going through airport security, do you think it matters at all if your name is Osama Bin Laden? Such a person is going to experience a much larger degree of scrutiny from TSA then a person named John Smith.
      - SomeOtherGuy 15y ago
        That's a great example, as it shows anti-virus scammers are just as bad as the airport security scammers. Someone being named Osama Bin Laden has no bearing on their likelihood of hijacking a plane.

tjoff 15y ago

Which is why MS Security Essentials really is a fresh breath of air compared to everything else (that I've tried).

joering2 15y ago

"Oh, the business of fear mongering." couldnt agree more. I am using PC with XP/7 for years now and never had a virus. I go online into some questionable websites and downloads sometimes but if user uses a common sense, he wont open that AllPrinterDrivers.exe from unknown source just to install drivers to his printer. I never needed and I think I never will need an AV.

freehunter 15y ago
Until you get hit with a zero-day browser exploit that doesn't need you to install an exe to run.
- politician 15y ago
  Question: if he's hit with a zero-day exploit, how does having AV installed help?
  - jgmmo 15y ago
    Answer: Good definitions are crafted so that are intended to detect not only all existing versions seen but also allows room for change and file characteristic changes so that future versions of the malware family can be caught with the same definition. Good definitions will go on killing items in the wild well past the date the initial zero-day came out (the one that caused the need for the definition in the first place). This is why brand new generations of malware drop and they are detected by a few security guys. This is also why some people have huge #'s of FP's -- because they allow so much room for flexibility to catch future malware - that they accidentally kill off legit files in the process.
    - politician 15y ago
      Well, ok, that makes sense; I thought the OP was trying to say that AV provides protection against brand new zero-day exploits which seems like wishful thinking.

gus_massa 15y ago

A false positive is very bad for the AV Company if the file is part of the OS of a lot of computes. For example; AVG update bricks Windows 7 (Dec 2010): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/avg_auto_immune_update/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/avg_auto_immune_upda... McAfee update shutting down XP machines (Apr 2010): http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xp-machines/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-d...

jmcqk6 15y ago

A lot of virus protection software seems like the electronic equivalent of [protection racket](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket). They throw up these scary pop-ups that basically say "this is a nice computer you have isn't it? It would be... terrible if something were to happen to it, wouldn't it?" Interestingly, the best AV I've found seems to be the one from microsoft.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]