Author Topic: Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts  (Read 1863 times)

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Offline Saudate

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Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts
« on: February 18, 2014, 03:06:50 AM »
Hello Avast! community.

Avast IS 2014 seems to detect a lot of false positives on my computer particularly the AJAX toolkit DLLs that I've been using to develop an ASP .Net website. Whenever I debug my website using localhost, Avast would alert me that one of my AJAX toolkit DLL files was a suspicious item and that it had to be quarantined. This causes my project to produce tons of errors since it depends on the DLL files that Avast! deleted.

I loved Avast! that I recommended it to my co developers but then they also received the same false positive alarms when they debugged my website.
The only way to resolve this was to restore the suspicious file and add it to Avast!'s path exclusions. This fixes the issue but we all know that that's not a very good practice for an Internet Security suite is it?

Annoyed with this, I uninstalled Avast IS and switched to another security vendor (Bitdefender IS) that does not produce the same false alarms. I however, would like to reinstall Avast since I have been a solid user since 2001 but the issues keep on preventing me from using it anymore.

Can someone help me here? I do not want to give up on my copy of Avast IS but the false positives are very aggressive to the point that it hinders me from doing anything productive.

Thanks in advance!

Offline Lisandro

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Re: Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2014, 11:39:06 PM »
Did you try adding that dlls to the exclusion list? (it supports wildcards).
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Offline Saudate

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Re: Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2014, 01:00:43 PM »
The DLL files are named with random characters, numbers and symbols. I added the entire project folder to Avast!'s exclusions list BUT it's not a solid solution since if I change my project's location, I have to manually add it again to the exclusion list. Any ideas why Avast! does this? I disabled DeepScreen and lowered the Heuristics settings but to no avail.

Thank you for replying.

Offline Lisandro

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Re: Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts
« Reply #3 on: February 19, 2014, 10:33:36 PM »
Any ideas why Avast! does this?
The files have low prevalence and are rare. So the heuristic of avast! will (and should) detect them.
The solution would sign every dll (but someone will pay the bill of the digital signatures).

I disabled DeepScreen and lowered the Heuristics settings but to no avail.
You've lowered your defense level.
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Offline Michael (alan1998)

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Re: Avast IS 2014 aggressive false positive alerts
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2014, 10:41:45 PM »
The DLL files are named with random characters, numbers and symbols. I added the entire project folder to Avast!'s exclusions list BUT it's not a solid solution since if I change my project's location, I have to manually add it again to the exclusion list. Any ideas why Avast! does this? I disabled DeepScreen and lowered the Heuristics settings but to no avail.

Thank you for replying.

As Tech said. *.DLL (Wildcard.dll) will keep Avast! from blocking your DLL files. If you wish. Send them to Avast! as a FP and see what they can do.
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