Are AV False Positives Hurting You?

Gerald asks: "After the most recent Wireshark release a certain AV vendor's product started warning users that the installer contained adware. Since then, I've spent several hours verifying this isn't the case, trying to get the AV vendor to fix their stuff, and reassuring affected users that we do not ship adware with our product. Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated case. I've had to do this several times over the past few years, and each incident uses up time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's even worse for other projects. If you produce software, have you ever suffered collateral damage from AV false positives?"

Comments

yup

[TheSHAD0W]

I've had false positives from AV software before thanks to my use of NSIS as an installer. Apparently it's also a favorite of malware creators. I don't blame Nullsoft, but instead lazy AV makers who should know about NSIS by now and should test their signatures against it before publishing them.