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 del

Answer 1

I remember another weird one:

A file was being flagged as suspect. The only thing is the file was an .OBJ! An .EXE that contained the code the .OBJ contained wasn't considered a problem.

Answer 2

VS Platform toolset 2010 renders my simple program to be detected as virus. Changing the toolset to VS 2013 solves it.

It just creates a HttpWebRequest and writes the result to a file.

Answer 3

plus to what others'v said, modern anti-virus programs rise virus-alert if your programs uses some "suspicious" APIs too ( like URLdownloadFile or other API hooking related ones). if you google "delphi RAT FUD API undetectable" you'll find many interesting topics .

Answer 4

Yes, my team has experienced this maybe half a dozen times in 2-3 years with Sophos in a corporate environment. So, very rarely, but it does happen.

Our IT cretin started off demanding I review all the 1.5M lines of code in our app to "make it go away", but he didn't get too far pursuing that line...

To be fair, he was initially concerned that our clients might also receive such a warning, but we've only ever seen it triggered when building an exe from the IDE on a developer's PC, never on a release build exe on a test box or elsewhere.

Personally, it happens so rarely we don't worry about it.

Answer 5

In some apps, if I use RtlVclOptimize.pas, the Avira antivirus tell that I have created a virus.

Answer 6

Sounds more like a heuristic screw-up to me. Do you have heuristics turned on (some scanners may refer to it as "virus-like code")? The chances that time stamps would equate to "a portion of some virus signature" seems too small to be happening all the time.

When I used to run a virus scanner, I never saw this problem with D6 or D7.