Also known as a false alarm, Viruslist.com says, "A false positive is another way of saying 'mistake' [by the antivirus program]. As applied to the field of antivirus programs, a false positive occurs when the [antivirus] program mistakenly flags an innocent file as being infected. This may seem harmless enough, but false positives can be a real nuisance."
As software technology becomes more sophisticated and complex, it is very difficult to have perfect accuracy when detecting malware. In a real world example, a good person can sometimes be misunderstood as a suspicious person. Security is like real life. In the case of false positive alarms, our experience has been that the majority of antivirus vendors take prompt action to eliminate this type of problem, but some are still slow to respond.
Yes, we say any antivirus software that seeks an independent certification must pass the false-positive test. One of the well-known antivirus test organizations is Virus Bulletin (www.virusbtn.com) which measures antivirus software against this criterion - accuracy of virus detection and false positive alarms. You can view their independent test report before making a purchase decision about antivirus software at:http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/results?display=summary.
We continue to work with the largest vendors who are very responsive and quick to solve any false positive problem; but there are some who are vey complacent about false positive alert issues. Thus, we strongly recommend that before making your anti-virus software buying decision, reference to reports like 'virus bulletin' mentioned above will help you make the best decision possible.
Yes, this is certainly possible, as software technology becomes more sophisticated and complex. Plus, there is software that is equipped with self-hacking proof which may cause false positive alarms on antivirus software. It is important to let both the antivirus and the application software vendors know about such issues as they arise.
We have detected a few false positive issues with several antivirus companies that have detected our module as malware. We continue to work with major companies to resolve this issue.
The following is a list of antivirus software that are known to raise false positive messages with BlueGem Total Privacy and keystroke encryption software:
BlueGem encrypts every single keystroke as it is entered on the keyboard, and we shield our modules from possible hacking attempts. These defense mechanisms sometimes cause false positive alarms with some of the antivirus software [shown above]. The best antivirus software is not only be able to discern between good and evil software but will also work to promptly resolve any false positive alarms as they occur.
