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Re: [Bug-gnubg] Adware in my gnubg


From: Michael Petch
Subject: Re: [Bug-gnubg] Adware in my gnubg
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 19:03:13 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0

On 2015-03-27 6:13 PM, M Belanger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm sending you [personnaly] this message because I don't want to show
> it on the "bug webpage (savannah.gnu...)" so everybody could see it.
> 

The bug list is a public mailing list so it is still available for
everyone to read, however that isn't a problem. We aren't hiding
anything ad we welcome your potential concerns even in public or CVS.

> I've just scanned my computer with my antivirus and it detected an
> adware in the gnugb folder (it seems to be a backup, on the "D" drive).
>

That isn't normal but it could be a number of different things that are
related to your own system, and other things you may have installed or
the virus/malware scanner that was used.

> I did download gnugb at the beginning of january, and I took it on the
> official website of gnubg.  I've recently (jan-feb) posted some bug
> reports on the bug webpage; I wonder if it is related to this?
> 

Do you have the exact link and version that you installed? There is a
development version (1.05) and the official 1.04 releases.

> Is gnugb safe (it's free), and how this may have occured?  Do you
> recommend me to erase and reinstall gnugb?
> 

Before I ship executables they get virus scanned, and I also use
www.virustotal.com to upload the file and scan it by 50+ virus scanners.
It is hard to say what the case is. It could be a false positive
(malware detector incorrectly identified a problem that wasn't really a
problem); something else on your system put a problem file into the
gnubg directory; the file you downloaded wasn't from the official site.
I have had some people download GNUBG from softonic and that will
install crapware.

False positives have happened before especially with Norton (Symantec).

So some questions.

What file was found to be a problem?
What was the malware/adware type found?
What Virus scanner/malware/adware scanner was used?
What version of GNUBG was installed? What link did you download from?

As soon as I saw your post the first thing I did was rescanned with
www.virustotal.com and both the development 1.05 release and the
official download release from http://www.gnubg.org/index.php?itemid=22
(download setup) came back clean by 55 virus scanners including Norton
Symantec.

You can uninstall GNUbg and reinstall it again from the link above and
see what happen. Then scan it again with your virus or malware scanner
and see if it finds a problem. If it doesn't then the source of the
problem wasn't GNUbg itself but something else not related to our
product. If it does find the problem again I'd like to know the file etc
(the questions above).

Just because software is free it doesn't mean it is a virus or malware.
Virus and Malware detection is not an exacting science so they can get
it wrong sometimes.

If you can get back to me with the information requested it would help
me look into it further, but as it stands things seem fine.

Thanks for your email!

-- 
Michael Petch
GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304



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