The antivirus industry likes to talk about some of their mistakes as "false positives". Now you may think that an antivirus mistake would be letting in a virus and not catching it but I suspect that there are many more of these "false positive" mistakes that tend to make peoples' lives miserable. They certainly make our life miserable.

What is a "false positive". Let's have one of the biggest antivirus product/companies explain it for you:

which says:

"A false positive occurs when your Norton product incorrectly alerts that a file is infected, or a program or website is suspicious. Common indicators of a false positive are:


• Your Norton product alerts that a file or program developed and created by you or a legitimate company is suspicious, or is a threat
  
  
• Your Norton product indicates that a legitimate website is malicious
  
  
• Your Norton product blocks downloading a file as suspicious"
  
  

Stop and think about this for a moment, are they detecting viruses, or are you?

I rely upon this as prima facie evidence that most antivirus software today operates with the assumption that software is guilty until proven innocent.

If you are a large software manufacturer, with million of people using your software programs, then antivirus companies make sure to avoid warning consumers that you have a virus because that becomes an enormous embarrassment for the antivirus company. Has that happened anyway? Oh yes it has, have a look:

Popular Antivirus Program Mistakenly IDs Windows as a Threat, Creating Chaos

But this was story was even more amusing:

Panda antivirus labels itself as malware, then borks EVERYTHING

Now imagine that you are a niche software company like Compulife, which serves a mere few thousand customers. If you are an antivirus company, and you give that software a "false positive", does anyone care?

The problems with modern antivirus products are not unknown. Here are a few more articles that you may want to consider on the subject:

False Positives Sink Antivirus Ratings

No one antivirus product is free of these issues.

Antivirus Aggravation: False Positive Detection Delivers Negative Outcome for Windows Users

Translation: Antivirus products can be a pain in the butt.

And just so you know we are not alone in our sense of frustration with this:

Why Anti-virus Software Sucks

This article offers some advice about how to deal with the situation:

Exclude Files from Norton Antivirus Scans - Ignore False Positives With File and Folder Exclusions

The problem with the "exclude" advice, where basically you use a function in the antivirus software to identify some files or folders as "off limits" to the antivirus software, is that most customers don't know how to do it. And because each antivirus product has its own way of doing it, and because the antivirus companies frequently change how that is done, we simply cannot keep up with how they all work. We are here to answer questions about our software, not some other software that has managed to intrude on the function of our software. And frankly, it shouldn't be our responsibility. You decided to put the antivirus software on your computer, don't you think you should learn how to make it work?

But our biggest problem is the customer who places more faith in their antivirus program than our assurance that there is no problem in the Compulife product. Paranoid that our software may be infecting their computer the customer tends to believe the antivirus product versus a live human being from Compulife telling them the problem is not in our software. And that's before our customer has even tried to talk to the antivirus support people (usually located in a foreign land).