Curious possible Trojan in my app?

[tedsmith]

I am in process of making an app using quite a few different controls including Odamo's stream thingy. All runs ok in the IDE but on one machine with Windows7 64 bit and with Avast virus detection running, when I compiled it after adding some more routines and tried to run my exe it says my exe contains the Evo-gen Trojan.
In an attempt to isolate if one control had introduced it, I removed a number of subroutines in turn. One subroutine I had added earlier in the construction (a very simple Command1_click(index) one from 4 command buttons that simply changed the time of day by minutes or seconds) removed the 'Trojan'.
Is it possible I accidentaly generated code that was similar to the real virus and fooled Avast? Or do I really have a Trojan?
I rarely use this computer on the internet and never for email.
I do notice that windows media player does not work anymore after I installed another app of mine that used an older wimp control.
Anyone with a similar experience?

 

[SkipVought]

Ted,

AVAST latest free version causing nothing but problems
thread760-1740052

 

[AndyGroom]

I have the opposite problem.

My compiled EXEs often fall foul of both AVG and Nortons despite being digitally signed and freshly compiled, but Avast doesn't flag up any issues. Perhaps Avast isn't a very good virus checker, or perhaps AVG and Nortons are over-zealous. I always used to recommend AVG Free to people but now suggest Avast instead.

- Andy
___________________________________________________________________
If a man speaks in a forest and there are no women around to hear him - will he still be wrong?

 

[dilettante]

I would certainly want any program attemtping to change the system clock to be flagged as malware. Why on Earth would anyone even do this? We have the NNTP service now to deal with drifting clocks.

Code signatures have little to do with trust anymore. They have become far too easy for people to obtain, and far too many people who have them have proven they cannot be trusted. They are no longer Get Out of Jail Free cards.

 

[dilettante]

As far as getting infected goes, the leading cause today is running the unsupported and unsafe Windows XP. Numerous security holes are now well known and will never be patched.

 

[AndyGroom]

*crack open back molar and think of England*

- Andy
___________________________________________________________________
If a man speaks in a forest and there are no women around to hear him - will he still be wrong?

 

[tedsmith]

It may be difficult for younger people to believe but there are still numerous computers in use that do not need or connect with the internet.
These can be dedicated data gathering devices or used in manufacturing industry or a simple enquiry terminal.
You need a simple user interface to correct the time because all computers drift somewhat even if it is only a few seconds a day.
My application in question does have such a function and the command buttons I removed were the ones to set the time!
Hmmmm?

 

[AndyGroom]

I sympathise. I wrote a database application several years ago and every so often we needed to add more fields and I had to write an upgrader to change the file from one structure to a new one. I kept altering the same code, recompiling into a new upgrader, quite happily. When I got to compiling an upgrader to upgrade the file from v6 to v7 AVG would always delete the EXE as soon as I'd compiled it yet it was quite happy with the previous 6 compilations and on the face of it there was nothing different in the new one other than the difference in the file structure which it was reading. It was obviously a false positive but it meant ditching AVG. Perhaps your AV is picking up on the fact that your program changes the time, perhaps it's just a combination of bytes in the EXE it doesn't like (as was in my case).

- Andy
___________________________________________________________________
If a man speaks in a forest and there are no women around to hear him - will he still be wrong?

 

[HughLerwill]

>You need a simple user interface to correct the time because all computers drift somewhat even if it is only a few seconds a day.
If the computer is on a network. You can synchronize time on a it with another computer on the network with

net time \\OtherCompterName /yes

entered from a Cmd prompt, or from a batch file at startup. You could shell to the batch file from vb but why bother.

 

[HughLerwill]

erm. My point being that if one computer on the network knows the correct time then others can retrieve the time from it.

 

[strongm]

>We have the NNTP service

But surely the NNTP service is in fact a "program attemtping to change the system clock" ... ;-)

 

[dilettante]

There is a difference between some rogue application and a trusted service.

 

[Unscruffed]

As far as getting infected goes, the leading cause today is running the unsupported and unsafe Windows XP.

That's nonsense. I use nothing but XP/2k3, and I haven't had any viruses at all for over 15 years. Good surfing habits and using a "hardware" firewall stops nearly all of them. If you don't use IE/Outlook, you dramatically reduce the risk even further.

As for XP, it's by far the most reliable and the best OS that Microsoft ever released - which is exactly why so many companies worldwide refuse to get rid of it. Many companies simply don't want to have to deal with all the unnecessary and unwanted bells and whistles of later OS's.

For people who are always trying to get something for free by downloading warez, cracks, and the like - they will always be at risk no matter what OS they use.

As far as getting infected goes, the leading cause today

... is individual surfing habits.

The yearly number of infections in large company networks would be miniscule when compared to the yearly number of personal PC's that get infected - and the OS has little to do with it.

Heaven doesn't want me, and Hell's afraid I'll take over!

 

[dilettante]

Then all of those Patch Tuesday and emergency security vulnerability fixes must be because Microsoft is just bored?

 

[tedsmith]

Yes and if they still had someone walk ahead of every motor vehicle with a red flag there wouldn't be any road accidents!

 

[strongm]

>which is exactly why so many companies worldwide refuse to get rid of it.

In a business survey carried out in the middle of last year by Adaptiva, the reliability & stability of XP did not feature at all amongst the list of reasons why businesses who had not yet upgraded (about 50% of the businesses surveyed) gave to to explain why they had not done so*. And the 'yet' is important, since a significant percentage said they had every intention of upgrading as soon as they got the opportunity.

*The top reason by a large margin was application compatibility, followed by time constraints, and then cost.

 

[dilettante]

To be fair the Windows 8 debacle dampened a lot of spirits too. With Windows Vista and Windows 7 nearing end of life as well I suspect some are holding on to see how viable Windows 10 will be.

But at this late date still not moved off XP to something supported? All I can imagine is a legion of box jockeys who didn't want to learn how to support post-XP OSs. Surely by now most of the creaky old boxes that came with XP preinstalled have long been replaced and many got downgraded back to XP. Oh, the shame!

At this point home and small biz users with old hardware on life support may be stuck. Many vendors stopped providing hardware drivers for Windows Vista and Windows 7 a while ago - if they ever did, making moving impractical in many cases. Such machines will never get drivers for even newer versions of Windows. But then again a 10 year lifespan for a PC isn't really all that bad anyway... time to buy more!

If you did at least download the drivers from your vendor before they pulled them you can always get Windows 7 yet. I just bought another copy the other day for a new "build" (really just a barebones ASUS box not a full from-scratch build). At least it came with a drivers disk for Windows 7 and Vista, though nothing older.

 

[HughLerwill]

> on life support ...
Provided not least by MS Security Essentials perhaps which continues to work at some level. Easy enough for MS to provide I expect while extended support continues for Windows Server 2003; I used to think that ends in April this year but Wikipedia is not agreeing with me today. Let's see what happens in the spring ...

 

[tedsmith]

I don't know why there is a continuing argument in this thread concerning XP which my original question didn't mention anyway.

Because I mention XP people shouldn't assume that I normally use it.

I moved off to Win 7 some time ago but I still keep a drive ready in a 3 yr old computer to go back to XP if I find something that was written or runs with XP is giving problems. I still have to service some clients with computers that are so old they won't run in Win7.

Many of the newer motherboards or video cards wont run with XP anyway or there are no drivers and probably in a few years they wont even run in Windows 8!

I have noticed some oddities with old apps running in the 32 or 64 bit, home or pro versions of Win 7 but this is nothing to do with XP. These problems are there irrespective of whether the OS then app was designed or compiled in and I suspect more to do with dll compatibility.