Contact Centre

Knowledge Base

Find the answer in our Knowledge Base:
 

Antivirus reports malware in a SoftPerfect product

Why it happens:

From time to time, we receive messages from our concerned users saying that their antivirus found a malware in one of our products. This occurrence is called a false positive. For various reasons, some security products may occasionally or permanently flag a file as malicious, even though the file is perfectly clean and safe. For example:

  • A component of NetWorx may be flagged as “NetFilter”. This is a third-party network driver used for filtering out local traffic, which unfortunately has also been misused in some malware, thus resulting in its being treated as suspicious by some virus scanners. If you are concerned about this detection, you can use the portable version of NetWorx, which doesn't contain the traffic-filtering driver.
  • Network Scanner may be flagged as “NetScanner”, “Netscan”, or similar. Naturally, this application has network-scanning capabilities. However, some antivirus products are incapable of distinguishing legitimate software, aimed to help network administrators to keep their network safe and secure, from malicious software.
  • A new product or a new version of an existing product may be flagged as “WS.Reputation” or “Suspicious.Cloud”. This means the file has not been installed on many computers yet, simply because it's new.

What we do:

  • We do not bundle any viruses or malware with our products.
  • We sign every file with our digital signature. Check the Digital Signature tab in the file properties. If you downloaded the file from our website and it carries our digital signature, it is safe to use.
  • We work with antivirus vendors and normally they promptly white-list our products whenever we tell them about a false positive. However, some virus scanners are prone to recurring false positives and/or are slow in fixing their false positive detections; for example Cylance, Elastic, Eset NOD32, Malwarebytes, MaxSecure, NANO, Rising, SecureAge Apex, Sophos, Tencent and Trapmine.

What you can do:

  • Contact the vendor of your antivirus software. Send them the flagged file and ask them to analyse it more thoroughly and remove their false positive alert.
  • Scan the flagged file with VirusTotal — an advanced online virus scanner. VirusTotal aggregates scanners from over 50 different computer security companies, which gives you a more comprehensive report than a single scanner. Apart from a few false positive detections, the vast majority of reputable antiviruses should report any safe file as clean.
  • Remember the most important safety rule: always download our products directly from our site. This is the best guarantee that the software has not been tampered with.

Article details

Article ID: 13

Category: General product questions

← Go back