"False alarm! As in, never mind!" (False Positives)

[Starry Windy]

There is one of the pet peeves among some of the antivirus users, and it's called False Positives, where when we open a certain harmless application, the antivirus would halt it and detecting it as an virus, and quarantine (or in worst scenario, delete) it afterwards. What's your opinion on false positives, and did you have the experience on false positives before?

 

[Dragon_Trainer_]

I HATE FALSE POSITIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had my worst experience with them. When I was young, everything that happened in my computer made a really bad and lasting impression on me.

When I was 8 years old, I was a huge fan of some specific old-school games. One of them was Quake 4. I used to play the game offline always, as we had a USB centered, dongal type net connection. Once, I was playing with the net plugged in. The game tried to access the net to authenticate online play. As the game was unofficial, the firewall and anti-virus blocked it and immediately blocked it. It was deleted within moments. I cried. Lots.

After so many years, I'm double that age now and have almost completed the game after having started it a few days ago. But I still switch the laptop to Airplane Mode before launching the app :(

 

[Starry Windy]

I have several cases of false positives, one of the most recent example was when I was about to check system files, and the antivirus detected dfsc.sys (which I found out later that it's a vital part of Windows OS) as a virus and quarantined it, and that almost makes me worry because I was unable to bring it back due to privileges issues until I got a workaround in it.

False positives can be dangerous at times, for sure.

 

[Hiatus]

I might have experienced that before, but only one occasion. Maybe twice, but can't precisely remember.

When it did happen, I've downloaded an application called "Photoshop Portable" (which runs basically runs like original PS, but without a few features, if I recall, some of which weren't exactly important to be as I've never found myself using those tools), and since it was an unofficial program and whatnot, antivirus software I happened to have installed at the time--Avast--wound up claiming it as virus.

I knew that it wasn't contaminated with any virus of sorts, for sure; one of my friends had it installed inside their computer, and it did not seem to cause any harm in the slightest. Regardless of how tough I tried, though, Avast still wouldn't let me start it, so I disabled the software for a while and managed to find a workaround. It was sort of hassle, but still did it either way; I honestly needed to, haha.

 

[Starry Windy]

Speaking of false positives, in about a week ago, I was using a certain anti-malware software, and for some reason it detects a certain harmless MP3 utility as a malware (using the latest database at that time) and then quarantined it, and when I looked it up, the anti-malware company says that they will fix it. Thankfully it doesn't detect the MP3 utility as a malware anymore nowadays.

 

[obZen]

I got a false positive during my Kasersky + Vista days, for a keylogger
Luckily, it was just a bug in the AV
They patched it