So, Avira Flagged Something in my Portal Download from Steam?

[Zarathustra[H]]

During my Portal download using the Steam client.

It was caught by the heuristics filter, so I'm guessing this is a false positive... But is it?

 

[Ebernanut]

Every detection I've seen based on heuristics has been a false positive, with .dll files it's often because it has a scripthook. You could always submit it to virustotal or jotti to see what other AVs think.

 

[M76]

I only used avira for a very short period. There were a lot of false positives. It's the anti virus that cried wolf one too many times.

 

[rezerekted]

I stopped using Avira because it gets so many false positives. Microsoft Defender is good enough form me and even that gets false positives sometimes.

 

[pendragon1]

^ what they said and second the ms defender, it works fine.

 

[GoldenTiger]

^ what they said and second the ms defender, it works fine.

Yep.

 

[JustinCorrigible]

FWIW, I am using Sophos Home (mostly because we manage Sophos Endpoint at work), and I haven't received any false positives, especially with games.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Well, I went ahead and white-listed my Steam folder in Avira. Hopefully I won't live to regret it.

 

[John721]

A fair bet that it's false positive. I used Avira for a few years, and it had a nasty habit of reporting many false positives. It would even block Micrsoft's media creation tool for making a Windows 10 bootable usb drive. I'd like to hope they fixed that, and I'm sure they did, but that was the last straw for me. Several years ago, Avira was consistently reporting more false positives than competitors on AV-Comparatives as well. I'm not sure about recently, but false positives have been a traditional weakness of Avira for a long time.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

A fair bet that it's false positive. I used Avira for a few years, and it had a nasty habit of reporting many false positives. It would even block Micrsoft's media creation tool for making a Windows 10 bootable usb drive. I'd like to hope they fixed that, and I'm sure they did, but that was the last straw for me. Several years ago, Avira was consistently reporting more false positives than competitors on AV-Comparatives as well. I'm not sure about recently, but false positives have been a traditional weakness of Avira for a long time.

I switched to Avira several years back when I finally got tired of AVG Free's nagware. Then, shortly after moving to Avira it got just as bad.

There was a time when Windows defender ranked up there with the most effective antivirus packages, but Microsoft has neglected it for over a decade at this point.

I don't even use my Windows install for general purpose computing. I do all of that from my Linux install. I only ever dual boot into Windows for games.

I probably don't even need the live protection because of this. I could keep it off and just run an occasional manual scan, maybe even from Linux using ClamAV or something like that.

Other than Defender, what are people using these days?

 

[DocNo]

Defender. If they would release a home version I've been pretty impressed with Cylance Protect, which my work recently moved to. Talking with the security folks, they showed several ransomware variants it caught but machines of ours that haven't yet been migrated to Cylance didn't catch (running Mcafee if I remember right). And it certainly is light weight.