Windows 7 with Avast Antivirus (1 Viewer)

anewn

Portal Member
September 20, 2009
14
0
I just upgraded my system to Windows 7 Home Premium. I also installed Avast Home Edition antivirus. After I loaded Media Portal, MP TV-Series, and Moving Pictures and ran Media Portal, Avast popped up warnings on the fanart directory saying the images contained a jpeg virus of some kind. I highly doubt that it's right, so I wanted to share. No questions, just an FYI.
 

reverson1

Portal Pro
May 23, 2006
88
4
Williamsburg,VA
Home Country
United States of America United States of America
I just recovered from a virus that seems to have gotten into my email... I also had some infected jpegs from thetvdb as well.


Avast had complained about the images, but I assumed (foolishly it seems) that it was a false positive since they came from thetvdb. Idk if the images are virus scanned or not when they are uploaded to their server, if not it might be a good idea to do so...
 

zicoz

MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • September 3, 2006
    896
    63
    Home Country
    Norway Norway
    Just to be safe I'd make a thread on the thetvdb-forums about this. If people are using these open databases to spread viruses it is a big problem.
     

    Paranoid Delusion

    Moderation Manager
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 13, 2005
    13,062
    2,978
    Cheshire
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Hi all

    With this kind of problem, try downloading the image reported by AV manually and scan, there have been reports of the same thing occuring using MovingPictures plugin, this was found to be the conversion by windows to change the format of the file to jpeg, causing some corruption in the file which the AV software did not like, so wondering if the same thing is happening with the TVSeries.

    Regards
     

    RoChess

    Extension Developer
  • Premium Supporter
  • March 10, 2006
    4,434
    1,897
    All the regular part of a virus scanner does is match so called 'virus fingerprints', which is a string of bytes that uniquely identifies a certain virus. New virusses come out every minute, which is why it is important to keep your anti-virus database updated often. That's why a lot of virus scanner offer Heurithic scanning ability, which allows them to detect unknown virusses by analysing their behaviour instead of just matching them up to a string.

    And unfortunatly that string of bytes can be accidently created as well, this is called a false positive. The odds are low, but with the massive amount of random bytes on your computer from files downloaded (or created) and the huge amount of virus fingerprints, the odds are much better then say finding somebody on this planet that has the same fingerprints as you do.

    Use VirusTotal - Free Online Virus and Malware Scan otherwise, which allows you to verify your suspected file on a multitude of virus scanners (41 at this moment).

    AVast is known to have a lot of false positives, which is why I personally avoid it, so it could be that. But just use virustotal.com then, because if your system is indeed generating infected JPEGs, then all 41 scanners will show as such. If it's only a few, then you most likely are dealing with either a brand new virus (pay close attention to the result of Kaspersky, TrendMicro and the more respectable ones, as their response time to new virusses is less then 4 hours) or more then likely a false positive.

    Virustotal.com generates a hash on the file you upload, so you can go back to their website later and verify the same hash. A new virus is quickly picked up by other scanners, and false positives are usually removed.
     

    Users who are viewing this thread

    Top Bottom