I have downloaded a bunch of miners and of course my AV checkers are going off about them. I am wondering, a bit for technical curiosity, if there is another way to know if there is a rare chance one of them might have one.
You can never tell for sure, but a multi-vendor site such as
https://virustotal.com/ at least can give you more than one opinion. It is common for one or two products to detect mining software as a virus, since some malware uses the same software to mine on infected computers. If say more than 5 of the sites on virus total flags it, I would be wary. Of course, if even one flags it you should be using caution, but as you already seen there are also a lot of false positives on this type of software.
With all of this being said, it is safest to assume all software your download is infected and to never download mining (or other) programs on the same computer that you keep any wallets. I know this may be easier said than done if you only have one PC and use it for everything, but it the end it is the best practice to keep your coins safe.
