Accidentally created a virus?

Question

I've seen it happen reasonably often: I write an application in Delphi and when I compile it, the virus-scanner tells me that I've created a virus and then immediately deletes the executable again. It's annoying but reasonable easy to fix by doing a full rebuild, deleting the *.dcu files first and sometimes by simply waiting.

It happens with Delphi 6, 7, 2005 and 2007, as far as I know. And Symantec, Kaspersky, McAfee and NOD32 have all been guilty of reporting these false positives. I know it's because Delphi adds timestamps to its DCU files and these timestamps end up in the final executable and apparently appear to be part of some random virus signature.

I don't want to disable the virus-scanner, not even for a single folder or file. And I'm not really for a solution, but am wondering about the following:

• Do these false positives also occur with other compilers?
• Does it also happen with .NET executables?
• Do others also notice similar problems with Delphi?

Answer 1

Do these false positives also occur with other compilers?

Yes, this is has been a common problem in the past for AutoIt as addressed in this forum post "Are my AutoIt EXEs really infected?". In most cases including AutoIt it stems from poor heuristic practices. Since AutoIt uses the free and open UPX compressor, it is often mistaken for malicious code that also uses UPX.

The best (and possibly only) thing you can do is report these mistakes, so they can refine their heuristics or at least white list your app.

Below is a list of contact information for some popular anti-virus companies. They all claim to appreciate submissions as it helps them make their product better.

• AntiVir - Contact
• A2 (A-Squared) - Contact (email address)
• Avast! - Contact
• AVG - Contact
• BitDefender - Contact
• BullGuard - Contact
• CA Anti-Virus - Contact
• ClamAV - Contact
• ClamWin - Contact
• Comodo - Contact
• ESET's Nod32 - Contact
• eSafe - Contact (login required)
• Fortinet - Contact
• F-PROT - Contact
• F-Secure - Contact
• G-Data - Contact
• Kaspersky - Contact
• McAfee - Contact (email address)
• Norman - Contact (email address)
• Panda Anti-Virus - Contact
• Sophos - Contact
• Symantec (Norton) - Contact
• Vipre - Contact
• Windows Live OneCare - Contact
• ZoneLabs - Contact

Turns out there is a great list of AV software on wikipedia, called 'List of antivirus software'. It is more complete than my list above.

A member of the Autoit Forums made a great script to e-mail a false positive to a huge list of AV vendors to automate this process a bit.