Malicious Software Warnings

What are they and what are they really saying?
Why do you need administrator privileges?

Security is a tricky thing. One needs to be vigilant in order to protect themselves but too many procedures can lead to security fatigue and/or paranoia. It would be nice to say that a one-size-fits-all solution exists but security suites only exasperate the situation – by giving too many notifications that are written in technical-legalize that only serves to confuse the average non-computer-literate user.

But what else are cyber-security vendors to do? They know their customers are not experts in cyber-security. They know their users are not the most technical. So how does one approach the concept of protecting a computer from all the bad stuff that exists?

Over 1,000,000 new pieces of malware are created each and every day. Such volume makes blacklisting a losing proposition. Some companies try a heuristics approach – analyze what a computer program wants to do and it tries to do anything “bad”, stop it. But as is the case in life, this can be tricky to do. A program wants to change the time – should permission be granted? That depends and false positives are not good for business.

The only way to eliminate false positives is to employ a whitelist solution. This is an effective solution but leads to a gated-community experience. The problem with such a solution is that unless one is willing to only use a relative handful of programs. Smaller developers do not have the time, money or resources needed get approved – and that is only for a single vendor. This needs to be done multiple times. Daunting for a large full time developer – impossible for smaller ones.

So security vendors are doing their due-diligence and popping up a window saying that one of our programs is potentially unsafe. Which makes sense from their perspective. From our perspective, it’s a false positive.

For those who want to extra due diligence, download but quarantine the program and then scan with a more-up-to-date security program.

We would say use virustotal.com but virustotal also gives our software false positives.

Why do your software need administrator privileges?

Admin privileges are required when making special requests. Some of these are relatively benign and others are potentially dangerous. Whenever possible we avoid requesting admin privileges and when we do, we let you know you beforehand.

If it makes you feel any better, know that we get them all the time. The software that WE WRITE triggers their alarms. What is also amusing is the warning says my IT administrator. Does this mean that Microsoft actually owns our devices?

Microsoft Warning

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