More on Anti-Virus Programs Suck

Following up on the post Anti-Virus Programs suck…a customer of ours just reported that several of the files that we install in Articulate Studio ’09 is flagged as a potential threat by ZoneAlarm.  We protect our DLLs and EXEs so that other malicious people can’t come in and steal our code or make nefarious versions of our programs.  Doing this is not uncommon in the software world, many comapnies do this, including the anti-virus programs themselves.  Yet some anti-virus programs like ZoneAlarm flag any DLL that has been protected by obfuscation are flagged as potential threats.

So each time we get a report like this I spend a considerable amount of time contacting the anti-virus company and asking that they no longer flag our software.  In every case so far the anti-virus company has responded and identified that we were flagged falsely and they tell us it will be addressed in their next update.  Unfortunately ZoneAlarm gives you no way to contact the company unless you are a paid customer.  They do reference in one of their KB articles a way of reporting false positives (http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/support/hot-issues-vista-zonealarm-computer-security-suite.htm#6), however, the email address that they provide is no longer valid.

You would think that Anti-Virus software companies would start to realize that falsely identifying a legitimate program as a virus is almost as bad as not catching a virus.  In both instances a user is being prevented from doing legitimate work.

I would be interested to hear if people had recommendations for other anti-virus programs that don’t suck.  I use OneCare by Microsoft, and for the most part, it is pretty good…in the past I have had success with Norton too.