Home > Virus Alerts
Why some programs may cause your anti-virus or anti-spyware scanner to show an alert.
Modern anti-virus programs can detect a wide range of potentially dangerous programs. This normally goes far beyond traditional viruses and worms and often includes heuristic alerts, which basically means that you can get alerts when an anti-virus program "thinks it could be ..."
In many cases, users download a keylogger, remote access software, PC monitoring software or similar applications, not realizing that these programs actually could be considered a trojan. Not because they are infected with anything but because they could violate your privacy or IF they were installed WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE!
If anti-virus software did not warn you, then anybody could trick you into installing such software, or install it on your computer without your consent.
- Software that logs or captures keystrokes
- Software that monitors user activity
- Software that allows you to recover passwords or other personal data
- Software that monitors or logs Internet or network activity (sniffers)
- Software that allows you to access or control your PC remotely
- Software that acts as a server (FTP server, mail server etc.)
In addition, many anti-virus programs will warn you about "hook" related dangers. A "hook" is a way for an application to capture keyboard input. This is often used for hotkeys (press some keyboard keys to start the app, or make it do something) and a common programming technique. Unfortunately the same type of technique is used by many keyloggers - they use the "hook" method to capture your keystrokes, instead of keyboard commands.
If you downloaded the software from us, you can be sure that we verify all products and test them before we include them in our catalog, and we have never had a single incident of a "real" virus or trojan since 1997. So if you run into any "hook" related warnings, it is very likely to be a regular feature of the software that is misinterpreted by your anti-virus software. You may want to check with the anti-virus vendor or the software author if you have concerns.
Make sure that your anti-virus signatures have been updated today!
Get a second opinion, using free online scans. These are available from several commercial anti-virus vendors and allow you to scan a file (or your entire PC) online.
Free online scanners:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/licence.php
http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus
VirusTotal (includes all of the above and more)
