Everytime I browse Lemmy, my Bitdefender always pops up

Should I just ignore and/or whitelist this? Gotta admit it’s a bit c/MildlyInfuriating tho…

  • trouser_mouse@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    When something like these pop up, what steps can someone take to determine whether they are false positive and actually safe or a valid alert?

    • Anony Moose
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      BitDefender is actually really bad about giving you useful information to go off. Ideally it should tell you exactly what malicious action or malware it’s detecting. If your AV does this, you can see if the particular type of detection makes sense.

      For example, if it’s an executable file with a clearly displayed malware name “Trojan.BadTimes.X” or something, that’s really bad news. Same for URLs. However, sometimes AVs will flag “malicious behaviour”, which gets trickier. They will often flag qBittorrent or other legit apps that are used to download pirated software, etc.

      What you can do is to submit the file or URL that was flagged to VirusTotal. This shows you a comprehensive list of whether any other antivirus software is also marking the file/URL as infected.

      Generally though, I’d play it safe. I’d get in touch with the page owner or google around to see if this is a known issue, and unless I can be completely sure it’s actually safe, I wouldn’t use it.