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, password cracker, 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 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.

People (usually) use common sense to determine whether a situation warrants an alert. If you took a rifle on a hunting trip, nobody would pay much attention to it - if you took it to the supermarket or a movie theatre, the reactions would be quite different. It's the same rifle, but it is used under different circumstances, which makes a big difference. Your anti-virus software does not have any common sense, it cannot know if you are installing a software willingly or if someone else is installing it. Therefore it will issue an alert, and that's the way it should be.

Now, this does not mean that you should grant a Card Blanche to any password cracking or keystroke logging software. A malicious author could theoretically operate under the cover of this "expected alert" and install a real Trojan as part of the package. That is why you should only use products from a reliable source, check out their website and look into some reviews. If you download software from Snapfiles.com, we have already done this job for you.

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!

Before you panic, get a second opinion to make sure it's not a false positive. You can use free online scans, they are available from several commercial anti-virus vendors and allow you to upload and scan a file online.


Free online scanners:

Recommended: VirusTotal (scans a file with 30+ antivirus products)

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan/licence.php
http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus