Bitcoin Forum

I just ran a complete system scan on my server using AVG business edition, and something surprising popped up. It detected a virus in the bitcoin.exe client program and quarantined it. The virus it claims to be infected with is some kind of trojan horse:


This is probably a false positive however, considering the "generic" bit of the virus name, so I am not worried about it. I was just wondering if anyone out there has had the same experience with their antivirus apps thinking bitcoin is a virus.

How should we deal with this? Would it be a matter of contacting AVG so they can modify this in their definition updates? This really is not good if we hope to grow the bitcoin economy. People new to bitcoin will be sceptical it if their AV's tell them the client is a trojan!

I've got the same situation and will be following this thread with interest.  I sure hope it's a false positive....

Likewise...

This may have been answered elsewhere actually, I will do a forum search now.
I know, should have searched before I posted this thread.

EDIT:

There are many threads already that are reporting the same issue.
Here are a few links to some of them:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43752.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43741.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23465.0

Same virus from AVG too. Tho i was the first to discover this!

Congratulations?

I just updated AVG and ran a scan.  It no longer finds a problem.  They must have fixed it.

bitcoin and the other clients, connect to an irc server, they also make several connections to other people running clients, this is very similar to how most trojans work. Virus scanners like to error on the side of caution.

If you dont know how to check for yourself, then perhaps you should run your BTC client in a Virtual machine or a sandbox. Why give it access to your main machine if concerned?


WHERE IS THE SECURITY SUBFORUM?

I said I was not concerned, if you reread my post.
I have no qualms about running the client on my machine whatsoever.

I was simply pointing out the fact that AVG was falsely reporting bitcoin.exe as a trojan, and why this would not be a good thing if we are aiming for bitcoin to be scaled to population-size levels.

AVAST does not report it as a virus, and i trust avast a lot more :P

I was adding that for people who are reading this thread. At any rate, you should still run in a VM especially new clients. And their isnt shit bitcoin can do about avg false positives except  for us to write avg and say "fix that" and send them a copy of bitcoin.

virus scanners do that to legitimate apps all the time, especially internet facing ones. crap norton  once took out teh chinese version of windows xp by deleting crucial system files. (http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/05/19/913193.aspx)> this is one of the largest most famous anti viruses, taking out a version of the worlds most popular desktop OS at the time. It doesnt say crap about bitcoin, no it isnt good news and yeah you should complain to avg.


and FOR EVERYONE ELSE.. if you are unsure, RUN IT IN A VM OR A SANDBOX


and where is my security subforum.