False Positive Watch

While debugging any issue that arises on Windows, my go-to trick is blaming the anti-virus or firewall. It almost always works. As important as these security solutions are, they can be so disruptive at times. For developers this usually comes in the form of a false positive. One day, out of the blue, a user emails you and blames you for trying to infect their computer with Virus.Generic.Not.Really.LOL.Sue.Me.1234775. This happened so many times with NSIS that someone created a false positive list on our wiki.

There are a lot of reasons why this happens and a lot of ways to lower the chances of it happening, but at the end of the day, chances are it’s going to happen. It even happened to Chrome and Windows itself.

So I created False Positive Watch. It’s a simple free service that periodically scans your files using Virus Total and sends you an email if any of your files are erroneously detected as malware. You can then notify the anti-virus vendor so they can fix the false positive before it affects too many of your customers.

I use it to get notifications about NSIS and other projects, but you can use it for your projects too for free. All you need is to supply your email address (for notifications) and upload the file (I delete it from my server after sending it to VirusTotal). In the future I’m going to add an option to just supply the hash instead of the entire file so you can use it with big files or avoid uploading the file if it’s too private.