F@H virus

uknowist · 30 Sep 2008 at 23:35

I just downloaded Commodore firewall and its done a scan on my computer for virus/malware and its detected that folding @home.exe is a virus :confused:

I did a scan with AVG and it has not picked it up, anyone else had this before?

A.N.Other · 30 Sep 2008 at 23:56

No. Needless to say, I think it's been a little over cautious there.

Mattus · 1 Oct 2008 at 02:44

Yeah, over-cautious. There have been cases in the past where unscrupulous people have bundled with some other software a F@H client set to fold for their username, and racked up a lot of points before being caught. Doesn't really explain why it would be marked as malware though :confused:

Talrinys · 1 Oct 2008 at 09:23

Some anti-bad-stuff programs will mark down programs as malware for matching a specific profile, maybe F@H uses some calls(GPU client maybe, deep SSE instructions) that can be used by viruses, and thus it would rather catch it than not. But don't worry

rich99million · 1 Oct 2008 at 10:15

I've had false positives for F@H before - can't remember what software I was using at the time.

muon · 1 Oct 2008 at 14:21

Thats what you get with scanners using heuristics rather than a database. They give false positives on anything which may act like a trojan which folding@home sort of does. It downloads stuff from the internet uses your processing power and sends stuff off. pretty much what all mass emailers do right?