Antivirus False positive in my executable

Question

I just ran into an annoying problem. Suddenly Avira AntiVir started to flag one executable from my software as being a virus.

As the default act

Answer 1

There are several reasons why an Anti Virus product might trigger on a Delphi produced exe, a few common reasons are:

• Lots of viruses are written in Delphi and therefore your exe might have some code parts that look the same as existing viruses.
• The import table of your program is used to determine what your exe might do, for instance linking to Credentials Management or Disk Management functions triggers some AV's.

As suggested before try scanning your release version with online services such as Virustotal or Jotti and always report your false positives to vendors instead of trying to prevent being a false positive. My experience is that AV vendors react quite fast on submission.